We Are Hunted started out as a discovery service for music popular on P2P networks and music blogs, and has since branched out to provide music listening through its own apps on Android and Spotify. The team also previously built a number of iOS music apps, including one called Pocket Hipster.

The new Twitter app will curate music based on the people you follow on Twitter, and then stream tracks from Soundcloud, according to CNET writer Casey Newton, who went on to explain:

“Twitter Music uses four main tabs. ‘Suggested’ recommends songs and artists based on a user’s follower graph — artists they are following, and artists that other people they follow are following. #NowPlaying brings in links to songs tweeted by people you follow who tweet using that hashtag.”

Twitter has been putting a growing emphasis on media in recent months. The company gave photos, audio and video a bigger space in its feed with the launch of Twitter cards last summer, and more recently launched its first video sharing app Vine. However, the apps reported reliance on Soundcloud as a music hosting provider shows that Twitter may still shy away from striking its own deals with major media companies.

Just a few weeks ago, Sullivan announced that he was severing his relationship with The Daily Beast and launching a standalone website, and asked for reader support in the form of a $19.99-per-year subscription. In just a matter of days, Sullivan managed to raise more than $300,000 and said recently that he has a total of almost $500,000 now — and that more than half of those who contributed to his campaign paid more than they had to (one anonymous subscriber contributed $10,000).

Fans don’t want content, they want a relationship

When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was the “pay what you want” music experiments of bands like Radiohead and Girl Talk, both of whom asked their fans to pay for songs that they could have easily downloaded for free, and got millions of dollars in response. Why did fans do this? Because they wanted to support those artists, not because they wanted music for free — just as readers who want to support Sullivan probably don’t care that they can get the content free via an RSS reader (Note: Sullivan will be discussing his new approach at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York).

The Kickstarter campaign that Amanda Palmer ran last year to raise funds for a new album and a national tour falls into the same category (as does comedian Louis CK’s method of going direct to his fans to sell a concert tour): after quitting a deal with a traditional record label, Palmer initially wanted to raise $100,000 to fund her recording. Instead, she collected 10 times that amount, or more than $1 million. And the reason why her fans wanted to donate all of that money has very little to do with their desire to get an album, or even to see her perform.

Part of what Palmer has done — in addition to detailing what she is doing with all of the money raised — is to turn what could have been a regular tour into a series of personal events. Some of those who contributed got invitations to private shows, in which Palmer would not only invite attendees to come on stage and play (something that caused some controversy because she asked for volunteers instead of paying people) and otherwise interact with her.

As she describes in a recent interview with Billboard magazine, the rise of the social web has made it much more feasible for an artist to reach out directly to his or her fans — and many of those fans are going to be willing to contribute something, regardless of whether they get a direct return or not (a theory that former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly has called “1,000 True Fans”). As Palmer puts it:

“I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is — which is that music has value, it’s subjective and we’re moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level. My theory is that things aren’t going to pick up until people … instead of saying people should want to pay for music, I think people should want to help their artists. I really think it’s a different way of thinking.”

Connect with fans and give them a reason to contribute

Getting up-close and personal with an artist like Palmer (who at some shows allows her fans to paint her body with washable paint) may or may not be your thing, but there’s no question that it inspires devotion in a fan base. And while Andrew Sullivan doesn’t go as far as Palmer, he is obsessively interested in what his readers want and how they are reacting to what he writes. As he described in his “declaration of independence” post, one of the reasons he decided to look at reader subscriptions instead of advertising was that he wanted to deepen his relationship with his readers.

“For the first time in human history, a writer – or group of writers and editors – can instantly reach readers – even hundreds of thousands of readers across the planet – with no intermediary at all. And they can reach back. We want to create a place where readers – and readers alone – sustain the site. No bigger media companies will be subsidizing us; no venture capital will be sought to cushion our transition (unless my savings count as venture capital); and, most critically, no advertising will be getting in the way.”

One of the most common responses to both Palmer and Sullivan is that very few people can get away with making a living from their fans or readers — in other words, that the two are the “one percent” of artists or creators who can do this. But whether it’s one percent or 5 percent or more, the fact remains that the tools that allow Palmer or Sullivan to do this are more readily available than ever, thanks to platforms like Kickstarter and the TinyPass paywall system Sullivan is using — or 29th Street Publishing, which allows writers to create their own mini-magazines.

Will this allow every writer to do what Sullivan is doing, or every artist to do what Palmer is doing? No. But their example (and others such as Jonathan Coulton) show that as Mike Masnick of Techdirt puts it, when an artist connects with their fans and gives them a reason to buy or contribute, they will almost always do so. All that’s required is that you have something valuable to offer — and that you are as fanatical about your devotion to those fans as Palmer and Sullivan and Louis CK are.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Andres Rodriguez

RIM is also adding more discoverability and social capabilities to the new BlackBerry World, allowing customers to share their content and app choices with friends through messaging and social networking apps, and even through a form of proximity-based communications. From the Inside BlackBerry Blog:

With BlackBerry World, there are various ways to browse, download, buy, and manage apps using a BlackBerry smartphone, BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, or desktop or laptop computer, — inspiration is at your fingertips. And if you find something you love and want to tell the world, you can easily share it with your friends over BBM, Facebook and Twitter. Also, you can simply tap smartphones together and invite your friends to download it — just like that.

There’s no word yet on how extensive RIM’s multimedia library will be, what pricing will be like, or whom the company is partnering with to supply those songs and videos. We’ll find out soon enough though. RIM said the new content would soon appear in the BlackBerry World web storefront, and in the coming weeks BlackBerry phone and tablets will receive software updates to reflect the app store changes.

In related news, BlackBerry is again publicly mulling the possibility of licensing the BlackBerry OS. In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt, CEO Thorsten Heins said that RIM is now focused on proving its net-gen QNX-based OS BlackBerry 10 in the market. If BB 10 is a success it would consider licensing it to other manufacturers, Heins said – and not to just handset makers. The BlackBerry OS and RIM’s QNX automotive infotainment software are converging in a platform called Car 2, which could make BB 10 the first industry-spanning operating system.

Wenner Media describes the launch as a “planned progression” that began in May 2010 with Rolling Stone‘s Beatles guide app and continued with a music news iPhone app and the launch of Us Weekly on iPad last May. A digital replica edition of Rolling Stone is already available for Kindle Fire, Nook and Zinio, but the iPad edition is optimized for the tablet and “all of the album and song reviews and music-related articles will include a link to listen to music samples and purchase tracks from iTunes.” (Those are the red buttons in the image at left.) In his AdAge interview two years ago, one of Wenner’s arguments against releasing magazines on iPad was that it was too expensive and didn’t provide enough revenue; the iTunes affiliate partnership helps with that.

The iPad edition of Rolling Stone will not be bundled with the print issue. iPad subscriptions are $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year, while a single issue is $4.99 — the same as the print magazine on the newsstand.

The site, which lets people share their favorite music track-by-track, has proven an underground hit online less than a year after launching publicly: more than 100,000 users have signed up, sharing over 900,000 songs. But the London-based service was started as a pet project inside music data company The Echo Nest — and it’s now exploring what happens next.

“Up until this point we’ve been incubated by The EchoNest, but now we’re looking at options for spinning out in our own right,” creator Matthew Ogle told me.

It’s been an unusual course for This Is My Jam so far — in fact, Ogle says that the site “wasn’t supposed to happen for a whole bunch of reasons”. Chief among them? The fact he’d decided to move out of the online music industry after leaving his role as head of web product at Last.fm back in 2010.

“Despite swearing off online music forever, in less than a year I’d been convinced by the awesome folks at The Echo Nest that we could do some cool stuff together,” he says. “They didn’t hire me to make Jam, they hired me in a dual role to be their man in Europe — evangelizing at hackdays, talking to developers — and also to be a kind of internal product skunkworks, prototyping stuff based on new APIs and using that to spark new direction that The Echo Nest could be going with their data.”

But when it turned out that Jam, an idea he’d been throwing for a while, had more going for it than the other skunkworks proposals, Ogle’s focus switched and the parent company funded development. Jam now has four full-time staff, as Ogle brought on former Last.fm refugee Hannah Donovan, and engineers Ralph Cowling and Andreas Jansson.

The failure of frictionless

The site is one of my favorite services to have launched in the last year or two, and it’s one I’ve found myself going back to more often than I expected. Posting your favorite tracks and browsing the tracks of others turns the site into a curious mixture of status update and radio station. It’s a great tool for telling people about the music you like — lots of people use it to showcase their mood, for example. But it’s also a treasure trove of music, allowing you to dig around in the tastes of others. Because it’s almost exclusively focused on what people are listening to now, it has a real-time quality to it… yet the conscious decision that goes into making your choice means that the end result is more personal than Pandora but way more curated than Spotify’s frictionless sharing.

In fact, says Ogle, the failure of frictionless sharing to provide anything more than a fleeting dip into a raging river of data left an interesting gap for Jam to fill.

“I couldn’t quite believe that in 2011 that social song sharing wasn’t just a solved problem,” he explains. “One thing that we talked about at last.fm a lot — you know that amazing moment in real life when someone grabs you and say ‘you have to hear this song, check it out’ and they put the headphones in your ears or put a record on. Anyone who cares about music even a little bit has had that moment.”

“We’re in this golden age of social media, we’re always connected to all of our friends at all times, and there’s big data around music — Spotify and Facebook have basically taken scrobbling to the mainstream — [so] there should be more ways than ever for me to go ‘I want to hear some new tunes, what are my friends listening to?’ and get good stuff… not just whatever they happened to accidentally listen to on Spotify. Conversely there was no way for me to share a song that people would still see five hours later. Everything was being forced in real-time.”

Curation/exploration

Donovan, who heads up the site’s design, points out that isn’t just vanity that drives — the performative aspect of social media where you are showing off your taste to others — but a sort of shared curation where users collaborate to uncover interesting tracks, point to classics or dig up forgotten material.

“This was actually really cool when we discovered this happening, because there’s no other music service on the internet where it’s OK to have old stuff mixed in too,” she says. “Either everything is organized around the music data thing — singles live inside albums that live inside artists — or it’s promotional in some respect, in which case they’re always pushing the latest album or the latest single that just came out.”

“On top of that I think there’s something around our culture today that’s driven by newness, and how things on the internet always have to be the latest and the newest. I heard somebody say when you’re curating something, you don’t necessarily want just the latest or the newest, you want to dig up old things that were really great and put them back in context alongside newer things, or mixed in with other stuff. That’s the job of the curator and that’s what makes it really enjoyable for the user or the observer.”

“We thought about curation a lot when we were starting Jam. The overall effect is that our users became the curators of this music, and we wound up with this lovely space where you could get Prince and Fleetwood Mac right next to the latest trendy pop band.”

That is, in turn, helping the product develop further forward. Coming very soon are some new additions to the site’s Explore pages, which will offer up some new ways for users to browse the site. Explore categories will include “Breaking” (songs that have been jammed for the first time recently, and subsequently shared), “Rare” (songs that have been jammed only once), and another one that lists just the first jams of newly-registered users. Although it could act as a way for users to introduce themselves to the service, the first jams could also become a sort of Greatest Hits package.

“A lot of people sign up and start with their favorite song of all time,” says Ogle.

The project is called Avicii x You, and on its website, you can listen to and download the basic chord progression for the song’s planned melody. Starting on Wednesday, the site will begin accepting submissions (the process is still a bit vague) for audio samples of a fully developed melody using the chord layout, pitch and key Avicii has indicated. Over the next two months, the site will begin accepting submissions for the song’s bassline, effects, rhythms and vocals. The finished single will be released as a single on Feb. 26, coinciding with the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

It’s not clear whether participants will have any say in the samples used for the various tracks or any other input on composition beyond their initial submissions. But it looks like Avicii will have the final say on the finished single. In that sense, the crowd isn’t so much composing the song as providing a huge repository of raw audio materials.

Ericsson is spearheading the project with the help of Avicii’s label Universal Music Sweden as part of its Networked Society initiative, which aims to discover new means for industries, institutions and people to interact through real-time broadband communications. According to Ericsson, the music industry has already embraced the digital network as a means of distributing music and connecting to fans. The project will explore whether the network can be used as means of producing music as well.

But major artists like Adele, Coldplay, deadmau5 Taylor Swift and Rihanna have, over the last year, withheld their latest albums from streaming services, hoping for a downloads pay-day before a streaming long tail.

So how does Spotify manage the label relationships, and what will it take to make the service as popular everywhere as it is in its native Sweden? I asked label relations director Will Hope in this video interview at Spotify’s recent features event…

Apple announced the new availability in the fast-growing markets of Russia, Turkey, India and South Africa plus 52 other countries, almost doubling availability to 119 countries.

Although growth in U.S. sales of individual track downloads has slowed dramatically, labels have this year cited iTunes Store’s arrival in Latin America in January 2012 as driving a new expansion in sales of the format.

Therefore, I expect the service’s launch in an even larger tranche of fast-growth markets to bring even more buyers for the tracks — and, as a result, bring new money to a music format that many nevertheless consider tired.

Although labels in the west last year began embracing new mobile and subscriptions services like Spotify as an alternative to the iTunes model, on which they were dependent and which has slowed down, they should specifically welcome its launch in these overseas markets.

That is because many of these markets are underperforming, lacking significant digital customer bases and even royalty structures to make the sector tick.

As I reported this year…

• The Russian market is crying out for an effective legal digital music service — physical sales there are in precipitous decline, but even digital sales fell by 40 percent last year, to 2009 levels, and the labels say the country “is currently being held back by a culture of copyright infringement“.
• In South Africa, only 14 percent of music services pay royalties for the tracks they sell; ISPs and mobile operators stand accused as pirates and there isn’t even a relevant category for artists to benefit from streamed and webcast plays, according to a government report.
• Turkey, meanwhile, is Europe’s fastest-growing internet market, with very high engagement levels.

iTunes should significantly improve this situation — and that is good news for Apple and good news for labels.

But a complete repertoire is not yet in place in all markets, with iTunes’ delayed Russian launch reportedly still not benefitting from complete catalogue agreements.

And, in each of these new territories, the outfits will have to forgo the same level of money they have been pulling from downloads in established markets. Pricing varies at rates like 15 rubles ($0.48) per track in Russia and seven rupees ($0.12 in India), compared with the $0.69 to $1.29 charged in the States.

I wrote in September how, while Apple could well introduce an unlimited-access service to rival Spotify, it need not do so until that model has proved itself and until downloads start tanking. This coming new growth in downloads makes that tanking less likely.

• launching on iOS, Android and Windows 8.
• upping its catalogue from 10 million to 18 million tracks with new indie signings from Merlin, The Orchard, VidZone, INgrooves Fontana and Believe Digital.
• gaining bundled carriage on Lenovo Windows PCs, tablets and Android devices.
• upping its availability from 20 to 27 countries.

To anyone who has watched Rara’s activity – or, rather, lack of – since it was spun out in December 2011 so Omnifone could concentrate on being a B2B vendor, knowledge that Rara already operates in 20 countries is surprising. The company has few subscribers so far, if its reluctance to disclose user count is anything to go by.

“We came out of the gate very quickly,” CEO and Coca-Cola veteran Nick Massey tells paidContent.

“The priority over the last 10 months has been to complete the technical work. We’re now ready to start leaning in to the product.”

That will major on actually marketing the service in six countries – the US, UK, Sweden, Germany, Spain and Australia. But the campaign will be online-only, comprising networked display ads, Facebook ads, search engine marketing and affiliate partners.

As MP3 downloads slow down, music subscription is a segment ripe for business by several players. But it is also one increasingly dominated by its darling Spotify. Rara, launching substantially later, will have its work cut out making any headway.

Massey suggests Rara’s differentiation lays in Omnifone’s office location, the HQ of a record label.

“We’re competing for hearts and minds,” Massey says. “We want Rara to mean something in an authentic manner in the music space.

“We were born in Island Records, where Bob Marley recorded his music – we think we have compelling story to tell.

“We’re not like others who want to sell devices or software serves, we’re just about the music.”

But Rara faces big challenges, and some of the differentiators Massey spotlights are also professed by Spotify’s many other challenges.

“Hand-curated playlists are highly relevant to a mass-market consumer who is not necessarily a hardcore music fan,” he says.

“Rather than go home and go straight to the search box, maybe a better way is to go to the chillout playlist we have hand-curated for you.”

What is different is that, unlike Spotify and some rivals, Rara will not use the freemium model to pick up users for conversion to its premium service (£4.99 on desktop, £9.99 for mobile).

Instead, all users must pay from the outset – £0.99 or $0.99 for a three-month opening period before the full-price requirement kicks in. In this model, Massey claims to avoid some of the business model questions that have fallen on its more popular rivals.

“Eighty percent of all the people who use freemium never pay you,” he says.

“They have to bring in outside investment to prop up the usage. That’s not our model.

“Every user pays from day one, albeit something, so our requirements from capital are a lot less than the freemium guys.

“That leap (from £0.99$0.99 to £4.99/$4.99 and £9.99/$9.99) is less risky than the leap of taking someone who can’t or won’t pay and trying to convert them.”

That approach may make Rara more sustainable than Spotify, and requiring payment from everyone may give it better conversion rates. But it may also discourage younger listeners and other refuseniks who simply won’t ever discover the service.

The French unlimited-access service has confirmed a €100 million ($130 million) new investment round from Access Industries to fund an accelerated global rollout.

“It will change our world,” Dauchez told me. But he added: “We believe we should go everywhere outside of the US. We will be in the US when the market is mature, and when we have an edge not to be a me-too service.”

Last December, Dauchez signalled Deezer’s intention to launch in over 200 countries by this June. So far, it is live in around 100, however, and is due to announce further rollouts in a press conference at Abbey Road on Wednesday.

“It was necessary to speed up,” Dauchez says. “Up to now, the total amount of money invested in Deezer was just €15 million.” The company expects to have 200 staff by year’s end, around 150 of which are in France.

Deezer’s choice of new backer may raise an eyebrow since, in a world where major labels own collective equity in rival Spotify, Access Industries – operated by industrialist Len Blavatnik – is the owner of just one label, Warner Music Group.

But Dauchez denies the shared ownership could disrupt renegotiation with Warner’s peers: “There is a huge Chinese wall between the two investments. There is no intention in Warner being too close to us,” he said.

“When Access decided to acquire Warner, it was proof they believe in the turnaround of the music business — this is the next step for them. We saw all the top private equity firms and late-stage investors in the world — no one had the spirit of Access Industries.”

As so-called “celestial jukebox” services like Deezer grow to rival a la carte download stores like iTunes, Dauchez believes it is “just a question of timing” when they will overtake the latter.

To seize a growth opportunity in which Dauchez is targeting $1 billion in revenue, he will need not just to be available in many countries but to be relevant in them, too. The CEO says acquiring local music catalog is critical.

“What we learned in the past year is that not only is taste different — so is the marketing context. In homes in parts of Asia like Indonesia, mobile is the main screen for entertainment in the home; you have a very strong market if you come through mobile. By contrast, Russia is a big PC market.”

Today, Deezer has carriage deals with telcos Orange, T-Mobile, Everything Everywhere, Belgacom, Telenor and Millicom for France, the U.K., Poland, Ivory Coast, Mauritius, Romania, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary, Montenegro, Thailand and Honduras. But those different market conditions may require distinct deals elsewhere.

What’s more, it must be said that the majority of Deezer’s subscribers are the result of its favorable domestic carriage through its earlier investor Orange, which remains aboard. Now it is present pretty much everywhere Orange is, Deezer will have to strike out without its compatriot’s assistance.

In the US, Spotify – and, to a lesser extent, Rhapsody and Rdio – already have significant gravitational pull on new subscription consumers. Deezer claims two million subscribers out of 26 million users (7.6 percent conversion), versus Spotify’s four million subscribers out of 15 million active users (26.6 percent conversion).

Dauchez explains: “We are not so much a competitor of Spotify. We obviously have a different geographical strategy, a different product strategy. When we get a new subscriber, we don’t take it from Spotify, and they don’t take it from us – we both take it from piracy.

“We are each facing virgin markets – expect Sweden and France, all the markets are virgin markets.”