paidContent » music subscription services

Rdio brings its Spotify competitor to 20 more countries

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 11 Dec 2013 11:00:32 +0000

Rdio launched its music subscription service in 20 additional countries late Monday, bringing the total number of countries Rdio is available in now to 51. The new markets include 13 Latin American countries, Israel, South Africa, the Dominican Republic and a few smaller countries in Europe. The expansion could give Rdio a chance to leapfrog Spotify in some of these markets: The bigger competitor is thus far only available in 28 countries.

YouTube may be getting ready to launch its music subscription

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 20:33:35 +0000

There have long been rumors that Google is planning to launch a separate music subscription service for YouTube, and it looks like those plans are now starting to come together: The folks over at Android Police found a number of references to something called “Music Pass” in the latest Android YouTube app.

A file called music_upsell_dialog.xml contains text strings that promise offline playback to “take your music everywhere,” background listening to “keep your music playing while listening to other apps” and uninterrupted music with “no ads on millions of songs.”

A YouTube spokesperson declined to comment on these specific findings, and instead send me this statement:

“We’re always working on new and better ways for people to enjoy YouTube content across all screens, and on giving partners more opportunities to reach their fans. However, we have nothing to announce at this time.”

Google is already running a Spotify-like music subscription service called Google Play Music All Access, but there have been a number of reports that the company is looking to sell music subscriptions through YouTube as well. Most recently, Billboard reported that a YouTube music service will launch before the end of the year. The licensing agreements Google struck for its Play Music service also cover a YouTube offering, according to the report.

Using YouTube to sell music subscriptions could make sense for Google. YouTube is effectively already the most popular music service in the world, and the site’s charts of most-viewed videos routinely gets dominated by songs from major-label artists.

Slacker wants to take a page out of Muve Music’s playbook with telco partnerships

Janko Roettgers — Wed, 08 May 2013 22:00:50 +0000

Slacker is on track to partner with a major telco provider later this year to offer its audio service to the company’s subscribers, CEO Jim Cady told me during an interview this week. Cady expects that the partnership, which sounds a lot like Cricket’s Muve Music venture, will net Slacker “million of paid subscribers.”

Slacker, which competes with both Pandora and Spotify, relaunched its service in February with a bigger focus on a general-consumer audience as well as mobile listening. Cady told me that Slacker used to be geared towards hardcore music fans, but now tries to appeal to everyone looking for a combination of a curated radio experience and a subscription music service.

That revamp seems to be paying off: the company has added 100,000 paying subscribers as well as a total of six million listeners to the fold. Cady didn’t want to tell me the total number of people who currently pay for Slacker, only stating that it was somewhere between 0.5 and 1 million. But he did point towards a big growth in mobile, with 3.5 million new listeners on mobile devices since the relaunch.

Given that kind of mobile momentum, doubling down on carrier relationships does make sense for Slacker. Cady said that the company already has its app bundled on select handsets, and has billing relationships with all major carriers in place.

He didn’t spell out the details of the upcoming carrier partnership, which Slacker plans to announce in the second half of this year, but the logical next step would be to offer Slacker’s service as a default radio and music package to all subscribers of a certain tier, or even a carrier’s entire customer base.

That’s something the prepaid wireless provider Cricket has pioneered in the US with its Muve Music service. The company has been selling Muve as part of the data plan for all of its Android phones, and it now has more than 1.4 million paying subscribers.

Another area of growth that Slacker is looking to is automotive integration. Slacker is already part of the Tesla S console, and Cady said that Tesla owners listen two to three times as much as the average Slacker user, with some even clocking more than 100 listening hours a month.

Cady said that the car is an ideal platform for Slacker because it uses a more radio-like model. The service offers curated radio stations with DJS announcing titles, and even has news programming and other non-music content – all of which works great in the car. Said Cady: “People want to listen to more than just music.”

This is why Apple wants to launch iRadio

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:04:02 +0000

Apple is still dominating the digital download business, with eight out of ten digital music buyers getting their tracks from iTunes in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to new numbers released Tuesday by the NPD Group. Volume-wise, Apple sold 63 percent of all digital tracks in that quarter, followed by Amazon as a distant second with 22 percent. Apple wants to maintain that lead and keep its digital download biz healthy — and that’s why it’s looking to launch its own streaming service soon.

iRadio, as the service has been called by some, will reportedly mimic the functionality of Pandora, offering users continuous streaming with limited interactivity. The company is negotiating directly with record labels as opposed to relying on the type of compulsory licenses that are at the core of Pandora’s business model. That means that Apple might offer its users slightly more functionality and fewer restrictions when it comes to music selection and song skipping.

However, iRadio won’t offer on-demand streaming of complete albums like users have come to expect from full-blown music subscription services like Spotify and Rdio. That’s because the Spotify model directly competes with Apple’s music download business. Pandora, on the other hand, actually helps Apple sell more music.

The NPD Group noted Tuesday that 38 percent of U.S. consumers still think it’s important to own their own music. However, among Pandora users, that number was even higher. Here’s how NPD put it in its press release:

“Among consumers who listened to music on Pandora and other free music-streaming services, 41 percent reported that owning music was important to them; in fact, many free streamers attributed buying more downloads to their discovery on a radio or via an on-demand service.”

The company didn’t make any data available about people who pay for a streaming subscription, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see significantly lower interest in music ownership amongst users who pay for unlimited access.

That’s why it’s smart for Apple to invest in iRadio. The goal is not to kill Pandora, but to actually bring that type of radio service to more users, and keep them from switching to a full-blown access model. In other words: It’s not about Pandora, and all about Spotify.