eMusic Spike

eMusic increased it's rates back on November 21st -- single track prices rose from $0.25 to $0.33. Existing members (like myself) are grandfathered in at the old rates. They provided plenty a heads up to members well ahead of time that they could upgrade their subscriptions at the old rate and I bet many did. More downloads = more browsing the catalog. I bet they picked up a lot of new members before the 21st, as well.

How about Zune? Much as you hate the thing (for no very good reason, IMHO), it does perhaps herald a move away from itunes. and it seems to me to be targeted at an indie audience (look at the pre-loads), just as emusic is. and the timing is just right.

I thought allofmp3.com had been cut off at the knees by the announcement of Visa/MasterCard they would no longer process payments to that site. I expect traffic for them would be down. Although Norway did just rule allofmp3 legal. Norway giveth, VISA taketh away.

Cog: that's certainly possible, but Rhapsody, AllOfMp3 and Napster--which had similar traffic to eMusic last month--haven't seen a similar spike. So it would have to be a methodological change that only affected eMusic customers.

I'm going to make the conservative guess that Alexa just changed its traffic measurement methodology in some obscure way. Tom Waits may be popular but he's not that popular.

Another possibility is that emusic's decision to change its pricing plans attracted a lot of attention. It was linked (disparagingly) on BoingBoing, at least. People may be clicking through links like that, or people who were on the fence may have decided they want to sign up in order to lock in the old prices.

Tom Waits is the bomb! Might this have something to do with it as well:

http://www.kingston.com/flash/village/default.asp

Tom Waits: 'Orphans' would be my guess :-) The most hyped, NEW album on eMusic since I joined. The kind of album people stand in line to buy on release day. Might be wrong of course.