Indie Music Store Takes on iTunes

It sounds like a clich?, but it's true: a scrappy New Yorker is taking on one of the big guys. On January 23's Future Tense radio show, host Jon Gordon spoke with Josh Madell, the co-owner of Other Music, an East Village record store.

Madell's plan is right out of the eMusic/Long Tail playbook. Rather than concentrating on selling hit songs, Other Music will do what independent stores have always done well: Use their in-depth knowledge of music to sell more specialized music to aficionados. Less Justin Timberlake, more Funki Porcini. Also like eMusic, they plan to sell all of their music as high-bitrate MP3s, a tactic that already predisposes their catalog toward labels beyond the Big Four.

Despite my inclination toward Other Music -- most of my music shopping during the '80s and '90s was in stores just like theirs -- I have to wonder about the possible success of this initiative. Madell maintains that there has to be an alternative to the iPod/iTunes DRM system, and that iTunes is more of a Top 40-friendly place.

I'm not so sure about that second claim. I randomly picked 20 definitely-not-Top-40 artists from my music collection and searched for them on iTunes; I got hits on 18 of them. I tried entering the same 20 on eMusic, which also passes over the Big Four (and has had a pretty fair head start); a different 18 popped up. Furthermore, there were several instances where iTunes had more work from a given artist than eMusic, and vice versa.

Finally, Other Music plans to charge a little more than iTunes, to the tune of 10 to 15 cents extra per track. Given that eMusic's monthly rate can work out to as little as 27 cents per track -- and they also sell only 320-kbps MP3s -- I'd say Other Music has their work cut out for them.