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Twitter #music wants to be the sharing layer for the music subscription web

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 28 May 2013 17:17:26 +0000

Twitter’s big play in music started in an unexpected place: Stephen Phillips, product manager for Twitter’s new #music app, revealed at the 13th SF Musictech Summit in San Francisco Tuesday that his team worked above an auto body shop in San Fransico’s Mission district for months, intentionally separated from Twitter’s main offices. “We were actually hidden from Twitter,” Phillips said, adding that most people within Twitter didn’t know about the app until right before its public launch.

However, Twitter didn’t keep the development of the app hidden from everyone. Phillips said that his impromptu office above that body shop in the Mission had some regular visitors: Engineers from Spotify and Rdio were working side-by-side in the small office to integrate their music subscription services with the app. That kind of integration also enables users to share across the boundaries of these otherwise siloed services. “We were the first company to seamlessly move between those services,” he said.

Twitter built its #music app with a small team that came to the company from Wearehunted, an Australia-based startup that was co-founded by Phillips and that had been working on social music sharing around five years. News about Twitter buying We Are Hunted broke in March, and the company launched its #music app for iOS in April.

Phillips seemed very bullish on music subscriptions, arguing that the timing is right for access-based music services: “(This) could be the year that subscriptions go mainstream,” he said, adding that Google’s move towards subscriptions adds further momentum to the trend. Phillips added that Twitter also wanted to work with subscription services to enable users to listen to whole songs, and not just sample snippets.

So why not just launch a dedicated music subscription service for Twitter users? “We want to be a sharing experience,” and not a listening experience, Phillips said.

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CheckinDJ is the Foursquare for Spotify

Amanda Alvarez — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:39:17 +0000

CheckinDJ may be the cure for the bar jukebox dominated by die-hard Nickelback fans. True to its name, it’s a check-in app that uses music preferences from social network profiles to create playlists for coffeeshops and other venues.

Built by Mobile Radicals, a group of researchers and developers at Lancaster University in the U.K., the little jukebox lets users input their music tastes by tapping their phones on the device. The combined tastes of the group determine the playlist, which is streamed from Spotify. The playlist is fluid depending on people’s participation, so no one user can hog the music with their own favorites. There is also a limit on how many times a user can check in, and the majority has to agree on a musical genre for it to get played.

CheckinDJ uses a capability that many smartphones already have – near field communication (NFC), similar to RFID and present for example in the Samsung Galaxy SIII (Samsung calls them TecTiles). Checking in involves tapping the phone to the CheckinDJ “jukebox,” which is built off a Raspberry Pi mini-PC. CheckinDJ can also be used with other NFC-tagged items like library or loyalty cards, and once a few musical genres are selected and a social network identity is input (this happens automatically when using smartphones), the user can enter the jukebox “system of influence,” where they will start to affect the playlist.

Playlist influence increases with each additional linked social networking account and each new connected friend that checks in. The system updates every 20 seconds to adapt to changing group composition and preferences. CheckinDJ sounds like the perfect app to help turn your neighborhood diner into a Harlem Shake flash mob.

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Spotify buys music discovery app Tunigo

Laura Hazard Owen — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:38:29 +0000

Spotify has acquired Tunigo, a Stockholm-based music discovery app, for an undisclosed sum, AllThingsD reported Friday.

Tunigo works on Spotify’s platform and also has iOS and Android apps. Tunigo lets users browse Spotify playlists, discover new music and read music reviews.

Tunigo’s app will remain on Spotify and its employees will work from Spotify’s New York and Stockholm offices.

“The acquisition fits into our overall strategy around music discovery, basically helping our users make sense of over 20 million tracks,” a Spotify spokesman told me.

Twitter recently launched its own #Music app, which focuses on music discovery and was built by We Are Hunted, the company that Twitter acquired last year.

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Rhapsody exec: splashy ads and free streaming promotions don’t work

Janko Roettgers — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:03:55 +0000

How do you convince people that they don’t need to own music anymore? That’s a question that streaming music services have been struggling with for years. Both Spotify and Rdio have been ramping up their ad spending in recent months to attract more subscribers to their respective services — but they’re doing it all wrong, says Rhapsody VP Product and Content Jon Maples.

Rhapsody has been offering music subscriptions since 2001, much than any of its competitors, and Maples said in a blog post Monday that the company has made many of the same mistakes that he believes Spotify and Rdio are repeating now. One lesson Rhapsody learned the hard way is that ads for a music subscription service should be about the service, not artists or emotional connections:

“We tried the emotional connection to music with our Droga5-produced bubbles ad early on. The ad featured a woman who dove off a building into a bubble that immersed her into music. She dove into another bubble, and the music changed. Nice idea. Hard to understand in terms of product. Or value proposition. Or pretty much anything outside of diving off high rises, which we neither condone nor recommend.”

In case you’re curious, here is the Rhapsody ad in question:

Compare that to this much less artsy Rhapsody ad, which performed much better, according to Maples:

And here’s one of the ads Spotify is running right now:

But Maples didn’t just criticize his competitors’ ads. He also voiced some doubts about the benefits of giving away free music to promote subscription services. In particular, he took issue with a promotional campaign run by Rdio, in which the company secured exclusive content to stream for free on Rdio.com. Guesstimating the conversion rate for that promotion, he concluded:

“Rdio and Rhapsody are in the business of sourcing, identifying and enticing fans who are willing to pay for music. How you go about that is the hard part. My belief is that streaming companies have to sell the value of a music service and the benefits to customers instead of relying on an emotional connection to music, giving songs away or buying exclusive rights to a band’s new release.”

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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.

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Gracenote co-founder on ‘iPod day’ and better music through data

Derrick Harris — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 03:00:37 +0000

It was April 2000 when the team at Gracenote got a call from Apple that would change its business forever. Apple wouldn’t give Gracenote any specifics, but it did offer up some prescient advice: “You need to buy more servers.”

A few years into Steve Jobs’s second stint as Apple’s CEO, the company hadn’t yet reinvented itself as one of the world’s most-important technology companies, but it was a big-enough distribution channel for the two-year-old Gracenote. At that point, Gracenote had built a respectable business collecting and providing metadata for the compact discs that people were ripping onto their computers, and it relied on software partners to get in front of the music consumers doing the uploading. One of those partners was a popular Mac jukebox application called SoundJam MP.

Ty Roberts Source: Gracenote

So, Gracenote Co-founder and CTO Ty Roberts told me during a recent interview, his company heeded Apple’s warning and bought more servers. At some point around that time (details on the date of the acquisition are sketchy), Apple bought SoundJam MP. Then, at MacWorld in January 2001, Apple released the first version of iTunes (based on the SoundJam technology) and grew Gracenote’s footprint by putting it on more machines. In October 2001, Apple released the iPod and changed Gracenote’s life forever.

The holiday season — particularly Christmas morning — provides a clear example of how stark the change was. “We used to call it iPod day,” Roberts explained, because the company’s servers would go crazy as people opened up their new iPods and immediately began ripping CDs onto their computers. The company’s chief scientist would stay up 20 hours a day for 5 days straight to make sure the database didn’t crash under the load.

From that point on, Roberts explained, a graph showing the rate at which people were uploading music to Gracenote would go from a steady incline into a vertical line. At one point the company was getting metadata from — by Roberts’s estimate — literally every CD being ripped onto personal computers. There was so much database traffic — both writing and reading — because Apple didn’t release the first version of the iTunes Store until April 2003; if users wanted to use their iPods, they had to upload music first.

Scaling like the big boys

Today, of course, Gracenote (which Sony acquired for $260 million in 2008) is pretty much ubiquitous, at least when it comes to metadata. It has metadata for about 130 million songs — and growing — from all over the world and provides metadata to everything from iTunes to Path to your car’s entertainment console. Even if they’re not available for sale as MP3, if someone somewhere at some point ripped a CD and entered its information, Gracenote has data on those artists and songs.

Its database now gets 15 billion queries a month, or 500 million a day (“We’re probably bigger than Bing,” Roberts joked), and the company’s infrastructure has scaled a few times to meet this demand. What began as a small web database running on a few servers grew into an Oracle environment that provided better performance. And when Oracle became cost-prohibitive because of Gracenote’s expanding scale, it shifted again into a highly optimized system that spans thousands of cores in four global data centers.

Now, GM and VP of Automatic Content Recognition Michael Jeffrey noted, almost everything from the chip level up is optimized specifically for Gracenote.

There’s no “world music” when you’re in the “world”

And this setup lets Gracenote do a lot more than just recognize music listeners’ files and give them the album art. For one, Roberts explained, it lets Gracenote be a global company. “We want to have all the music in the world,” Roberts said, “… because our customers ship their products globally.” In fact, part of the reason it’s now part of Sony is that Sony was distributing Gracenote so widely as part of the music player in its Vaio line of laptops.

In order to ensure that everyone has a natural experience wherever they’re accessing Gracenote, part of the job of the company’s 100-person editorial team is to categorize music hierarchically by locality. So, when a user in Japan uploads a CD and Gracenote returns the metadata, it’s categorized as “rock and roll,” for example, rather than a catch-all category like “world music” that a U.S. user might see.

“We want music to feel like a person in your country actually organized it,” Roberts said, “not some dude from California.”

Better music and television through data science

All that data also makes Gracenote a natural fit for recommending new music, although right now the company prefers to let partners handle the algorithms because recommendations tend to be highly product-specific. For example, the iTunes Genius feature is a pretty run-of-the-mill recommendation engine, but, Roberts explained, Apple places a premium on accuracy because its recommendations cost users 99 cents (or more) a shot. With a subscription service like Spotify, though, trying new music is risk-free, so it can play a little faster and looser with its algorithms.

Because Gracenote is present in so many cars — about 35 million — the company has put a lot thought into how to optimally deliver services there, too. Until drivers can bring their interest graphs and music libraries with them to their cars, he explained, any sort of in-car recommendation engine has to be pretty simple and non-distracting — perhaps like thumbs-up or thumbs-down button on the display that will eventually be able to recognize someone’s tastes.

The company has even developed what Roberts calls “machine listening,” which is the ability of an algorithm to recognize the mood, tempo and other audio attributes of music. This is comparable to what Pandora offers, but Gracenote has data on pretty much any song someone could possibly have, which means it can make even your personal music library that much smarter. One idea the company is tinkering is something Roberts describes as “audio coffee.” Depending on any variety of factors — time of day, location, driving conditions or behavior — the stereo system could pick music that either picks up a driver’s pulse or maybe relaxes him.

For Gracenote’s next chapter, the company is banking tablets to deliver a kick like the iPod did last decade. Gracenote is already working with television partners on real-time ad-swapping and intelligent content recommendations, and now it wants to dive deep into the second-screen world. Its new product called Entourage uses a tablet’s internal sensors to hear the television show or music playing in a room and then surface related content, perhaps from the web — like what Entourage user Zeebox provides — or perhaps produced, interactive material like the SyFy channel delivers via its Sync app.

Two ads for two different viewers.

Later this year, GM and VP Jeffrey said, Gracenote will be doing pilots with some large sports broadcasters around a “cheer and jeer” feature that measures how hard people in a room are cheering for or booing their favorite sports teams. If you’re elated, you might see an ad for season tickets. If you’re sad, maybe it’s an an for beer.

Even Roberts is impressed, especially considering that the company’s first use of audio recognition was to make sure users got the right data for their exact version of a song: “I never thought the recognition would break open these kind of new fields.”

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Spotify hits 6 million paid users as market for music streaming heats up

Jeff John Roberts — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:13:20 +0000

Music subscriptions services, which provide an alternative to purchasing songs on sites like iTunes, continue to gain in popularity. One example is Sweden-based Spotify, which is expanding rapidly across the globe and has now added another 1 million paid subscribers in the last three months.

According to figures reported by CNET and confirmed by Spotify, the company now has 24 million active users and 6 million paying subscribers across the world. Spotify is also growing rapidly in the United States, where it arrived in July 0f 2011 and is this week hosting musicians at its “Spotify House” at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

Despite the hype, the underlying economics of Spotify’s business model remain uncertain. The service is beholden to musicians and studios, which request a 70 percent cut, and it must contend with a growing list of competitors that include Pandora, Rdio and SoundCloud. Meanwhile, YouTube is expected to launch a subscription service of its own in coming months and even Apple is expected to get into the streaming game too.

This competition validates the underlying premise of Spotify — that people want access to a giant catalog of music instead of buying it piecemeal through iTunes — but the arrival of deep-pocketed rivals may hurt Spotify’s ability to compete in the longterm.

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Rdio expands global footprint, Spotify reportedly extends free mobile offering

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:48 +0000

Rdio, the music subscription service backed by the founders of Skype and KaZaA, is expanding to Austria, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, Latvia and Lithuania. That brings the total number of countries with a Rdio presence to 24. The announcement of the expansion comes on the same day as a Bloomberg report stating that Spotify is negotiating to bring its free, ad-supported mobile service tier to all of the countries it is operating in.

Rdio, just as a refresher, is a subscription service that tries to set itself apart from market leader Spotify with a different take on social music curation. The company offers limited free music for up to six months, but doesn’t do ads.

That’s different from Spotify, which launched a free, ad-supported mobile radio service in the U.S. last summer. The company is now looking to expand its free mobile tier to all of its 17 territories, Bloomberg reported Monday. Deals for such an offering are still under negotiation, but Spotify could start with its free streaming as early as April.

Spotify’s free mobile service is more like Pandora, offering users limited interactivity with the hopes that some are going to subscribe to a full-service offering. And the interest in music subscriptions is definitely growing: Industry association IFPI’s latest Digital Music report (PDF) claims that worldwide, 20 million consumers paid for music subscriptions in 2012. And in Europe, subscription services made up for 20 percent of all digital music revenues during that time period.

That number was largely driven by a strong showing in Northern Europe, which is Spotify’s home turf – but services like Rdio seem to bet that this success story can be repeated in countries like Austria as well.

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Let the music play: Spotify for Windows Phone 8 arrives

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 18:40:22 +0000

Windows Phone 8 users may be in the minority but they’re no longer pining for their Spotify fix. The online music service launched a beta version of Spotify for Windows Phone 8 on Friday as a free download. While the app is free, the service is subscription-based at $9.99 per month.

Microsoft says it could take a few hours for Spotify to show up in the store — here it is in the online Marketplace — as it rolls out across various regions. Note too that the app requires Windows Phone 8, so older devices running WP 7, 7.5 or 7.8 likely aren’t supported.

Spotify, which boasts 20 million songs, does offer a free trial on the new Windows Phone 8 client. To try the service, you need to create a Spotify account first, then log in on the app. Without a credit card or any other details, that gets you 48 hours of free music. To extend the trial to a full 30 days, Spotify says to follow the email instructions it sends after account creation.

Aside from listening to tunes on Windows Phone 8, you can create and share music playlists, download music for offline playback and explore what your friends are listening to on Spotify, regardless of what mobile or desktop platform they’re using with Spotify.

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Music site This Is My Jam could spin out from Echo Nest

Bobbie Johnson — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:00:40 +0000

Buzzy song-sharing site This Is My Jam could be going independent from its parent company as it prepares to take the next step in its evolution.

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.

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