That's right. I said it. Just when we figured the Film and TV business were the dinosaurs in the room - lagging way behind in their understanding the digital business - the music industry is beginning to look more and more like the film industry. "How's that?" you may ask.
As you may have read in other places, Coldplay, like Adele, will not be bringing their new release Mylo Xyloto to streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio and the like. The official "artistic" reason from Coldplay's side was that the new album is a work that should be experienced from start to finish. Pretty lame excuse since single track downloads would be counter to that principle and the likelihood of a full album listening experience is much higher on streaming. (Unless, of course, they are making it a Full CD download only from iTunes)
While a four-track sampler of Adele's 21 is available on Spotify, that seems to be more timed with the release plan to drive CD and digital sales from iTunes and other stores. With 21 being the top selling album of the year so far, and Coldplay well positioned to enter in at No.1, there's no need to speculate on the obvious. There is more money to be made by these artists from digital sales than from streaming. Here's the deal. Artists get a fraction of a cent every time a song is streamed vs. around 20 cents per download from iTunes (according to calculations presented in a recent article in Rolling Stone). That's all well and good, and works for the likes of Adele, Coldplay, and a handful of other world-class artists,
Spotify announced today that that there will be a global press conference on November 30 with the theme "New Direction". What could that new direction be? Here a wishlist.
1. Up. As in Integrated cloud storage for your own library or library "matching". This would be fantastic and give iTunes Match a major headache. It would also allow Spotify to open up more catalog in more territories and/or fill the gaps from your own local library. Tracks that you have locally that are not available because of territory restrictions in Spotify's agreements, could be matched and made available to you based on your prior "ownership". While I love Spotify this is something they need to implement soon to keep ahead of iTubes and iCloud. I know iCloud doesn't technically "stream" but that's just semantics. It caches and plays a progressive download until that track is finished or you navigate away. Spotify is basically a bit torrent client playing up tracks from many points across the internet. That's what gives it such great performance - and is also why you won't see a browser-based Spotify. (unless some engineers out there have tips on how HTML5, Facebook and Spotify can fit together to make a torrent client) Likelihood: 3/5
2. Sideways. As in adding video. And not just music videos across the board, but branded artist pages with exclusive preview content. The seeds have been planted as you can see here with this exclusive video from Björk. This becomes a great way for artists to lift themselves above the chatter and get more plays, as well as leveraging the massive social connection via Facebook. This would also make display adverts a new source of revenue in the free service (powered by Facebook?). That is something that's hard to do when people or only listening and not watching. Of course - this assumes they have it all cleared with the labels and publishers. Likelihood: 4/5
3. Inside. Into the arenas in partnership with Live Nation or or other tour promoters. This would fit nicely into the brand page concept and create new revenue streams.
Timeline and modularity create space for Spotify, Netflix, Hulu and others
Well...one thing was accurate. The new ticker on Facebook was an indication of a complete revamp of the screen real estate and therein a new, necessary component of the user experience. It's current redundancy will be replaced by the other components of Timeline, which Zuck revealed yesterday at Facebook's f8 conference (keynote video here). I have to say that, while it sure is a more aesthetically pleasing layout of my social graph, it sure looks like FB is becoming more and more akin to the cluttered, overloaded UX that became the Achilles Heel of MySpace. I mean, I like pushing the boundaries of tech advancement, and the new business models that follow with that, but my feeling (as a user) is that FB is pushing the limits of human nature and information overload (even for the MTV/ADD generations) and that the whole thing could backfire if they aren't careful.
On the other hand I think the new Timeline concept has great potential if they manage to integrate the privacy levels in a thorough and clever way, AND if they make the modularity of it all simple and manageable. Two big elements of this which I think are fantastic are the (long rumored) Spotify and Hulu integration into the ticker. This is obviously step one of the process and even Daniel Ek at Spotify expanded on the development in an interview yesterday - saying there would be a Spotify widget as well like a player app as a module in the Timline view. So, as you can imagine, with a Spotify player, Hulu player (or other video play service), or even your friends' FB Video feed player (oh yes, it will come soon), your Nike training app, and other apps connected by the Social Graph APIs filling up your Timeline view - that annoying Ticker will become your default feed and trigger point for all things social.
Years ago, while I was working with content propositions for a handset manufacturer, one of the most powerful and underused tools we had implemented into the software was the live RSS reader on the standby screen. Now, of course, this is standard social integration via widgets on most smart phones. Facebook has just optimized the ticker experience to make it more complete and I would expect to see this lifted directly over to standby screens by most smart phone makers. One unfortunate side-effect they need to get a handle on is the seeming vaporization of privacy settings around that ticker feed. I'm seeing everything my friends are writing to everyone I don't know. That's not good.
So where do you get the new Timeline view? Right now it's only available in beta to FB app developers so unless you're signed up and have an app in the system it doesn't look like you will be enjoying this just yet. I predict the masses will bitch and moan only to give up. 250 million users will be pissed off and react, but the other 1/2 billion will follow the tail of the animal in front of them on up the trail of social web paradigms and it will all be business as usual in no time. Two things are clear: 1) Facebook has established the hooks to lift media consumption fully into the social engagement experience and now needs to just implement. 2) I wrote about it months ago when Google Music beta was announced, saying they needed to provide APIs to Spotify and others to tie into the cloud storage for my local files. Hasn't happened. And I don't see Google making as much progress as quickly as Facebook has. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said yesterday that during initial meetings with Facebook, Zuckerberg had asked him what his growth target number was. Reed gave Zuckerberg his number and Mark's reply was that for Facebook, success would be reaching that number... x2. Facebook is getting the media aggregators onboard.
Love 'em or hate 'em. Right now Facebook has not just the number of eyeballs but also the number of fingers hovering over the buttons and the hooks to trigger that crowd mentality. Call it "Real Time Serendipity", "Peer Pressure", "Recommendation" or anything similar, but with 750 million users wrapped up in your social web, your worst day is going to be miles ahead of your competition.
When I was a teenager you could have lifted me into any scene from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. I was a major music junkie. I spent all my money on albums (that would be vinyl) and listened to them till the grooves wore thru. And, like any properly cool teenager of the time, LP's were stored in orange crates or other similar packing crates. I maybe had 3 crates worth of vinyl at any given time, but I didn't come remotely close to my best friend, Matt. He must have had 5-6 crates of LP's. Very cool. And my brother-in-law? He had at least 10! He was cool beyond words.
You get it. Music is cool. Having music is cool. And in my youth, the measure of "cool" was the number of orange crates of LP's you had stacked up next to your amp and turntable. That was how you knew who to go to for music advice or to make a casette tape.
But, the measure of "cool" has evolved over the years. In the 80's and early 90's it was the number of CD's you had on your bookshelves (I was only up to about 500). With the advent of the internet and with many thanks to the team at Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft for inventing the mp3 format, the measure of "cool" evolved into how many gigabytes of mp3's you had on your hard disk. Fantastic! Everything playable on-demand right from my computer or even... wait for it... a portable mp3 player no larger than a pack of cigs!
Well now we've entered the new millenium, and following Kazaa, Napster, Limewire and every other "get your mp3's free" service, it's been said we have created a generation of music listeners who are lacking a sense of ownership. I would argue, however. that we have simply evolved to the next level in the music coolness equation.
Spotify founder, Daniel Ek, said recently in an interview that the future of music is not ownership but access. He is spot on, and has been ever since I first had Spotify pitched at me in 2008. In this case, what's important to understand is that "ownership" does not necessarily even need to mean "purchased music". "Ownership" means owning the ingestion, storing, database management, syncing and every other process of the file management - music listening experience. And all we really want and need to make it work seamlessly, is access. Quick, easy, access. Why else would radio still be so popular? I push the button in my car and music comes out. Butt simple.
So, in 2011, what's cooler than 120GB of mp3's on your hard disk? 10 million tracks in the air around you all the time, 24/7, just waiting for you to hit a button and bring them into your headphones, stereo, computer, car, tablet, smartphone, whatever. Has the currency of music lost it's value? Or is it simply that the process isn't worth it any more? Maybe a little of both. One thing is certain: access is the new measure of "cool". Accept it and get on board.
Wow! Big Green Spotify has launched in the USA. Hallelujah! (Jeff Buckley Spotify link attached) All in all the reviews have been very good for the gang in Sweden. Tweets from Brit-Brit, Ashton, and Mark Zuckerberg changing his FB status to mention Spotify. Even Sean Parker calls it "The realisation of my Napster dream". And that brings me to the point of my post today - the one key piece that all of the tech bloggers out there seem to miss when doing their comparisons of Spotify, Pandora, Rhapsody and others - it's shared DNA with Napster. That's right. Call it a distant cousin or a half-sister but Spotify and Napster Classic (not the New Roxio/Best Buy Napster) have more in common than Spotify and any other similar music service.
Nearly every review I have seen listing the pluses and minuses of various services gives Spotify a minus because it is a dedicated app and not a web app accessible from a browser anywhere. At the same time I did see one review which actually mentioned the speed of Spotify's streaming response (200 milliseconds). That post also failed to explain the fundementals behind Spotify's technology and therein its coupling to Sean Parker's Napster dream. Here it is.
Spot the Spotify U.S. holding page and sign up for an invite! That's right. Finally, Spotify is admitting they are rolling out in the U.S.and the last few deals with labels, publishers, collecting societies, and the rest of the hornets nest that embodies the music industry have apparently fallen into place.
This is great for my friends and family, and the rest of you back in the old (new) country. This is one service that can really fly in the U.S., especially if they get that deep integration with Facebook that we've been hearing about. Spotify was not included in today's "awesomeness" from Zuck and Co. but don't underestimate the power of a one-two punch. If FB gets both Skype AND Spotify integrated they will add a whole lotta stickiness to FB as an IM/Entertainment dashboard. Add all of your music likes and recommendations to the graph and soon we have a soundtrack for social advertising, pulling up the right content based on what is playing on my Spotify right now. Not necessarily music-related ads but simply using that soundtrack/playlist/catalogue and comparing it to the the social graph and serving up the right stuff. The converse could be even more vital for Spotify as they can now get better analytics for targeting ads into their free client.
Daniel Ek and friends just bagged another $100 million. One could argue that these monies could have helped finalize the label deals, but you could also wonder if the label deals helped convince investors of the viability. A successful U.S. launch weighs heavily on their future profitability.
Good luck, Boys! And to the rest of you, "Go sign up!" (shameless fanboy, I know)
So it comes to light that Spotify and Facebook are looking to get bumpy with each other. Pretty good for both. Forbes has a good read on the details here, but it would seem that Facebook wants to launch a dashboard with Spotify and perhaps several music services, and that's a good move. FB has seen membership in North America drop recently and my view is that their developer first culture is becoming their Achilles' Heel. Sometimes the changes seem very unwarranted and look like someone trying to keep busy on the 3rd floor. Too many changes, too fast, privacy issues and users that are beginning to give up. There is the risk that they become passé and the kids move to Tumblr, Twitter and others. So how do you stem the tide and keep people in your space longer? Add a dashboard with a music service so that we can always have Facebook open in the background.
Spotify was early out with social integration with FB and the match makes sense. With Spotify's impending US launch getting closer, showing up on Facebook's dashboard will be a great way to gain new subs in a market they need to survive long term. Can't wait to see it.
So apparently our friends at my favorite fruit company are out after "revolutionary" patents and marketing headlines. Over on Geeky Gadgets and other sites they have reported that, in advance of an iCloud announcement, Apple has filed for a patent optimizing track buffering performance over streaming services by caching portions of the songs to your internal memory (schematic below). The idea being that if the first few seconds of everything in your cloud library is cached locally (maybe cleverly managed by play count statistics) then when you jump to the next track there will be no streaming lag. Apple, when they finally launch a cloud streaming service, will tout this as the coolest, newest, most revolutionary thing to hit streaming music since, well, streaming music. Problem is they are about 4 years behind on this point if not more.
Spotify does this today and has been using this methodology, albeit better, since their inception. I remember being in a meeting with Spotify reps early on when they were pitching this new concept to our team in order to ingrate it into our handsets. Groundbreaking then. Proven success now. Spotify's version, however, uses a structure similar to torrents where not only do they cache a large portion of your cloud playlists locally - but what is not available locally on your device is cloud-sourced among other Spotify users that are online, thus accelerating the startup time for every track.
So I have a hard time seeing how Apple can legitimately get a patent for this but stranger things have occurred in patent land. All in all, for me, it seems yet another indicator that Apple, despite its immense success, is struggling with the disruption of other services to their long, tired, ecosystem. I love Apple, and Steve is God in the tech world, but I wonder how much his illness is beginning to ripple into operations and visions. Let's keep an open eye on that one.
