In what is perhaps a sign of the times, EMI (famously home to Pink Floyd and Coldplay) hosted a pitching panel for music startups last night at their Kensington HQ. A group of eight startups got to pitch their wares to a panel of big guns, comprising EMI execs, VC investors, a tech journalist (not me), and veterans like Last.fm’s former COO, Spencer Hyman. If you’re interested in what the startups had to offer, it’s worth reading MusicAlly’s summary – Webdoc, Seevl and DizzyJam stood out from the crowd for me.
The evening kicked off with a keynote from EMI’s strategy SVP Jim Brady, where he said selling (physical) records no longer helps artists, which I’ve already reported on for StrategyEye.
But an equally fascinating part of the speech was Brady’s summary of changing attitudes towards music consumption over the last twenty years. He outlined three models of contemporary music consumer – whom he dubbed Tower Man, MP3 Man and Homo Spotifyicus – and their evolving music habits. I’ve posted a transcript of that section of the speech below – worth a read in full for an idea of how the majors are trying to frame the pace of change.
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The Tower Man
We’re in the early 90s, life is blessedly uncomplicated. The digital disruption has yet to arrive – we have what we would call the well-behaved pre-digital music fan. He – statistically it’s a he – listens to radio, he reads NME or Billboard, he watches MTV and on Saturday he goes down to his local high street record store and buys what he’s been listening to. We call this man Tower Man after the late-lamented Tower Records retail chain which shuttered in 2006.
Buying music is really is the only way Tower Man can control the listening experience. He doesn’t control radio. So music is a scarce good – ownership is hugely important. In fact in many ways, Tower Man defines himself by the music that he owns, by his wall of CDs and you’ll often find him quietly judging others by their wall of CDs. You know who you are.
MP3 Man / iPod Man
Let’s now move to the second half of the nineties and the arrival of what we call the transitional music fan. The MP3 codec’s been around for a while, and by 1999 it’s formed Napster and Codester and an endless variety of stirs that offer free digitised music. Labels lose ‘monopoly control’ over the availability of the music.
For the tech savvy music fan, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. But only if you’re particularly tech savvy – the technical hurdles are quite considerable for the large majority of music fans. You might think all that access to all that music that the case for ownership would diminish, that music would feel less rare. But Early MP3 Man grew up musically in a time of scarcity, and the ownership habits of his parents are still ingrained. He’s got one leg over the digital fence. He reacts with the normal reaction – he starts to hoard. College networks start crashing, labels start suing, piracy becomes the topic of every music conference you go to and the market shifts in a fundamental way. CD sales start to decline, nothing new there. Of course MP3s also offered a high level of convenience, more than the CD or cassette. Music fans have shown quite consistently they will pay more money for music convenience. [...]
Apple makes a typically late, thoughtful entry into the emerging mp3 player marketplace. In 2003 it launches iTunes and our MP3 Man becomes iPod/iPhone man. So your entire music collection all on a cool little gadget so now you don’t have to break the law to join the digital revolution, you don’t have to be tech savvy – but it does tempt a bunch of new fans across that first digital divide.
The true digital fan – Homo Spotifyicus
As a music industry, we spend a lot time getting to grips with iPod man and rightly so. But we can’t get too blinkered by them – let’s move forward to the late Naughties. This is when we see the emergence of a true digital fan, and they are quite different from the previous two. For them, commercial music has never really been scarce, never been hard to access. We call that generation Homo Spotifyicus, sometimes Facebook man. And for Homo Spotifyicus, music is just around them all the time. [It's in] many new radio stations they might listen to over the internet, it’s in their parents’ CD collection (they have access to that), it’s on their elder siblings’ iPods, its on YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, it’s in the TV shows they follow, it’s in the films they watch, ads, video clips on Facebook, even in the computer games they play. True digital fans do not have a very strong ownership habit. What matters is instant gratification – being able to access that song straightaway wherever they are. To borrow a phrase from another arena, they’re not looking to collect Mr Right, they’re looking for Mr Right Now, musically. Of course we know there are open porous borders between these three groups of fans.
I was lucky to be early enough to test social music service Turntable.fm before the inevitable happened, and the startup fell foul of the licensing constraints which has kicked Spotify and Last.fm in the teeth. This is what happens if you head to the site from outside the US:
The service already displayed this to users who insisted on repeating songs or artists more than a certain number of times:
We had to skip your song because our music licenses force us to limit the number of times an artist can be played each hour in a room. Playing the next song in your list that is in compliance.
Capping the number of times a user could play an artist/song will have kept Turntable.fm the right side of copyright laws in the US. Users of Spotify’s free service face exactly the same restriction; as did Last.fm’s before the site dropped its on-demand streaming service. Given that Turntable.fm still has to pay monthly fees, it’ll be interesting to see how the service will monetise where many of its fellows have failed. Pete Kafka at All Things Digital explores some of the legal issues further.
As he notes, Turntable.fm “feels pretty special”. It does, and its occasional drawbacks don’t detract from its core offering. It’s not quite up there to replace Spotify – the current format of the service makes it a massive drain on your time, because you spend so long searching for and choosing songs. But then again, sharing music this way is so addictive, you find yourself wanting to immerse yourself for hours at a time. Which for a weeks-old service, is a pretty good sign.
Filed under: Music
Turntable.fm, a music startup which does a good job of tying social and music, has just hit 140,000 users in its first month if reports are to be believed. Effectively, the site allows you to play songs to friends or randoms through its streaming service, as if you were a DJ. When you sign up, you can either create a ‘room’ or join an existing room, which hosts five DJ slots. If you choose to DJ, you search for a song, cue it up and away you go. The service is inherently social, in that you can’t actually play music unless someone else is DJ-ing with you. See the image if that sounds confusing.
Additionally, Turntable.fm asks for your Facebook credentials – which helps reduce spam and keep it to a relevant social circle. Having said that, the service doesn’t actually show which of your Facebook friends is already on the service, which seems like a silly omission. Instead, on joining, you’re left stumbling around trying to navigate what is meant to be a social platform entirely on your own.
Given the need for Facebook credentials to use it, 140,000 users is actually likely to be pretty accurate an indicator of unique users.
UPDATE: I was wrong – this is actually an article from 2007 from what I can see. Still very much worth a read.
There’s an excellent and intelligent article by David Byrne in last week’s Wired. In it he explains how the artist/label relationship is changing, and maintains a rare note of optimism in a debate dominated by (industry) pessimism. This was a simple, but one of my favourite points:
What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over.
Revenue split between music formats (Source: Wired)
Filed under: Music
I am a music junkie.
This once meant poking about the small, stuffy record stores which are now quietly dying across the country. It meant forking out for exclusive editions, and re-releases and one-off pieces of merchandise.
Being a music junkie still means all of those things. But it also includes a generation of people who have replaced the radio with the internet for music discovery, who get a kick out of scouring music blogs for new music and…just…collecting stuff online. That might be through streaming, or downloading, or buying legally off iTunes – but the net result is that rather than walls of vinyl and CDs, this generation’s music collections comprise GBs of songs on laptops, iPods, CDs and bookmarked online.
But the people who traditionally want to make money from these music junkies can’t keep up with changing methods of consumption. Nearly 10 years after I downloaded my first album, what I now want is a legal, cheap method of collating everything I’ve gathered and heard over the years.
What I do not want is to spend hours and hours ensuring my music is in a normalised format, by burning, ripping and transferring it onto my computer. And then uploading it elsewhere. I’d rather put that kind of time and effort into crafting playlists, mixtapes or looking for new music.
Which is why I think the cloud storage systems – or digital lockers – launched recently by two tech behemoths fall very short of providing a solution.
The main value of Google and Amazon’s locker services is that after uploading all of your music, you can listen to it from any internet-enabled device. But I’m not sure mere portability is worth the faff of uploading – I’d rather dig out my long abandoned iPod, even if storage on that is limited.
In all fairness, Google and Amazon did have a good stab at getting label consent. Had they succeeded, they might have provided a more comprehensive music service which gave people more access to music and potentially share it among themselves. Apple is supposedly faring better, and with its high awareness of design sensibility and consumer behaviour, might have a good stab at providing a catch-all music service. (Then again, looking at iTunes, probably not).
Mark Mulligan over at Forrester brilliantly sums up the frustration felt by consumers:
But the problem for consumers is that they are effectively being forced to choose between licensed streaming music services (Rhapsody, rdio, Spotify, MOG, Napster etc.) and locker services such as Amazon and Google’s. The simple fact is that both should be part of a combined user experience. Streaming, purchasing, discovery, storage and playback should all be brought together into a 360 Degree Music experience. That’s what consumers want and is the logical answer to the questions the emergence of the cloud poses. 360 Degree Music experiences are what will sell devices and drive music consumption and revenue, not locker services alone.
I wrote earlier this week that Spotify is still determined to get the labels on board, despite this having delayed its arrival in the US by over a year. If it succeeds, I think (hope) it will prove the closest to what music junkies like me actually want – a well-designed service which lets you listen to music cheaply, easily and, most importantly, legally.
Filed under: Music | Tags: amazon, apple, cloud player, google music beta, spotify
So Google Music has launched in beta in the States. This is exciting news in and of itself (rumours of the service have been circulating for some time), but more interesting is the fact that Google has chosen to launch without the consent of the music labels.
Essentially, Google hosts a kind of virtual hard-drive (or cloud locker) to which you can upload music you already own, and then access/stream it from different devices. This is the nifty thing about the cloud. But it can’t sell you music, or do what Spotify does and ‘sync’ your existing library of music in seconds. This is a pretty serious thorn in Google’s side. Uploading songs takes ages – and is an off-putting process for users who own several gigabytes of music. That Google’s willing to forge on despite the limitations is a signal of how difficult negotiations with the record labels have been. They have proved obstinate enough to frustrate Amazon, which launched its own cloud locker service without industry consent in March, and Spotify, whose US-launch has been held up by licensing negotiations.
Amazon and Google, in their haste to establish some sort of lead in the ever-changing online music space, have proved willing to risk dollars on legal fees, for when the labels inevitably begin the round of legal threats. It’s possible that Apple may do the same, when it launches its own cloudy-iTunesy-locker-thingy – which it may do sooner rather than later to keep up with its rivals.
It’s hard to know whether this is the right approach. The ever-lovable small guy, Spotify, doesn’t seem to think so. I went to a BIMA-hosted event last week with Jonathan Forster, the company’s European general manager, who is very certain that Spotify wants the proper agreements before its US launch. Admittedly, it probably doesn’t have the money to try anything else. Interestingly, Spotify has adjusted its model slightly, shifting focus from its freemium-focused, ad-supported model to pushing users to convert to its premium service. It’s done this by restricting free listening hours and handing out Spotify Premium trials. This suggests that Spotify is looking for a more convincing way to demonstrate that it can offer strong digital revenues (to the labels), but Forster says that the changes are “not linked” to the US launch.
While Amazon and Google may be first to launch the next generation of online music services, it’s hard to know who might win this hare-and-tortoise race. When describing the push to premium, Forster said Spotify tried to make people “fall in love” with the service – which was possible with its huge catalogue of songs and quick streaming service. It may be that the bigger players have compromised good product design and innovation in their bid to get their services off the ground.
Most tech journalists will have been frantically trying to get hold of Spotify today as it announced it was massively reducing the amount of stuff you can listen to for free.
You can read a full account of the changes on StrategyEye here, or directly on Spotify’s blog. In summary:
- Anyone with a free or open account will find their free listening hours chopped down to 10 hours per month
- They will also only be able to listen to individual tracks five times before having to purchase it
- This doesn’t affect premium users, and anyone who’s recently signed up to Spotify still gets 20 hour per month listening access for a six month period.
When I spoke to Spotify earlier today, its communications guy said: ‘This is NOT a premium conversion strategy – we want to make that absolutely clear’.
He made the same comment to PaidContent’s Robert Andrews, who rightly wonders what exactly it is called when you limit your users’ access to your free service in order to push them towards paying for a premium account…
It may be that the music labels which license their content to Spotify are trying to convince the company that its existing business model cannot work. That is, unless it substantially reduces the amount it gives away for free. For some time there’s been an air of ‘too good to be true’ around Spotify, and the labels have been pretty wary of granting Spotify full access to their content. These negotiations have meant Spotify has yet to launch in the US – a market it’ll be pretty keen to crack sooner rather than later.
Immediate responses on Twitter and on the Spotify blog from users were negative. But Spotify is a beautifully-designed, fast and (for six months at least) mostly cost-free service, which has built up a loyal fan-base by not being iTunes – which, away from the StrategyEye editorial desk, I can safely denounce as a pile of shite. This latter quality alone is enough to convert me to paying a fiver a month, let alone the access to an incredibly decent library of tunes and jolly social sharing features.
So, Spotify – I have a horrible feeling the changes won’t work, but for sake of music lovers everywhere, I really hope they do.
Filed under: Music | Tags: best coast, detachments, guardian, james blake, middle east, salem, soundcloud
I’m not falling into the Christmas trap of listmaking (really not), but I revisited the Guardian’s ‘best new bands’ mixtape from August and still think it’s a bit wonderful. Detachments, Salem and Best Coast are particular highlights.
Filed under: Music | Tags: dungeons and dragons, guitars, linkin park, muse, thrice, weezer
There’s something irresistible about a boy in a rock band. The trouble is, it’s quite a technical job – understanding all that soundboard stuff, knowing which foot pedal to push, balancing vocals and so on. And music consumers won’t put up with all that raw 70s static any more. Which is why some of the best musicians in rock are among the highest profile geeks.
4. Chester Bennington, Linkin Park.
Maybe the first emo kid of the 90s, he and Mike Shinoda are solely responsible for the popularisation of nu-metal. Most successful geek posturing to be seen in In The End, where he occupies a suspiciously Civilisation-esque landscape looking dark and moody and capturing the hearts of an entire generation of female MySpacers. Geek credential: confessing to be one. Not that we could tell by looking at him or anything.
3. Matt Bellamy, Muse
Similarly weaselly features to Bennington mark him out as the high school oddity, to say the least. And no one gets that good at Liszt without spending an awful lot of time locked up alone. And just listen to the insane prog rock, Mellotron throwbacks on Origin of Symmetry. Still, groundbreaking performances at Leeds/Reading 2005 indicated that Muse’s careful attention to sound tech richly paid off. Detractors might say that the sheer scale of nerdish indulgence in Knights of Cydonia might be a little excessive…
2. Teppei Teranishi, Thrice
Still tragically underexposed, Teranishi is one of the most talented guitarists on the punk scene. The guy makes his own pedals! Dude! Like Muse, the band diligently think through their live sound, and describe themselves as gear dorks. We are not talking crappy college rock here, but crazy time signatures which even the makers of Guitar Hero steer clear of. I can only urge you to listen to the layers of complexity for yourself, since they’re beyond description.
1. Rivers Cuomo, Weezer
And topping our algorhythmic chart is everyone’s favourite bespectacled rocker. When taking a break from collating every popular YouTube star for their music videos, Weezer members spend their spare time playing D&D on their tour wagon. Incidentally, Cuomo favours a split class elf fighter-thief when dicing on the table tops, proving that the coolness of your D&D character increases exponentially with your RL geekiness. Pwnz.
