GigaOM » streaming music

Apple may not have answer for Google’s music service at WWDC

Erica Ogg — Fri, 17 May 2013 16:54:31 +0000

Google went and pre-empted Apple’s long-rumored iRadio streaming music service with a subscription music service of its own at this week’s Google I/O developer conference. Apple’s own developer event, WWDC, starts June 10, but the word is that its music service may not be ready to go by then.

The Verge says Apple is still “bogged down in licensing talks” with music publishers. Two of the big ones are still holding out, Sony/ATV and BMG, according to the Verge’s sources. That’s partly because what Apple is trying to do is not the same as Google Play Music All Access. Google’s service is a standard subscription service, like Spotify, and it will cost users $10 per month. It’s also not clear what the music catalog will look like for that service because Google has not yet announced which publishers have signed up.

iRadio is reportedly more complicated because of what Apple is trying to build and how it likes to do business. iRadio won’t be a straight-up web radio service; there will also be some on-demand aspects to it. And Apple also isn’t willing to pay music publishers an advance for access to their catalogs. Instead, Apple has agreed to give them a share of ad revenue, per-play fees and a guaranteed minimum payment, according to the Verge.

Apple already makes billions from its current content service, iTunes. It’s not essential that Apple have its own streaming music subscription service as answer to Google in a few weeks. But the company does need to acknowledge that times and habits have changed when it comes to music ownership. The developers conference seems a perfect place to debut it, but a fall event later this year when new hardware is set to be announced would be fine too; three more months doesn’t make that big of a difference at this point.

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A potential clue about Apple’s streaming music service surfaces

Erica Ogg — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 16:08:46 +0000

Last year multiple reports claimed Apple was working on a “Spotify-like” web radio service, and Bloomberg pegged the debut in the first three months of 2013. Now, some eagle-eyed iPad users may have found some clues that Apple is getting closer to making the service a reality.

Using a new jailbreaking software for iOS 6, bloggers from 9to5Mac say they were able to have a look around the files in their iPad, and in there found some so far unused icons in the Music app:

The files are called some variation of “radio button” with an icon that looks similar to the radio icon that used to be in iTunes for Mac (it was traded for a more prominent top location in iTunes 11 without the antenna tower). The iPad music app currently doesn’t have any radio functionality, so our first thought was that Apple would be adding an iTunes-like ‘traditional’ streaming radio to the iPad. Notably, jailbroken iPhones don’t contain these files in the Music app.

More interestingly, the name of these button files and are labeled with “buy” in the filename.

The images they found, below, are not currently in use. Nor, as mentioned above, are there corresponding images found in the iPhone’s Music app.

The image of radio “buy” buttons found by 9to5Mac in the iPad’s Music app.

It’s still not entirely clear how such a service would work, but Apple has been said to be in talks to license music from major labels to allow its iTunes users to pay a subscription fee to stream channels of music instead of one-off purchases.

If Bloomberg’s earlier report is correct, we should be hearing much more detail about the service sometime in the next two months.

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Why Apple would want to move into music streaming

Erica Ogg — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:29:44 +0000

Apple is reportedly looking to build its own web radio service through iTunes, something similar to Pandora. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have reports that say Apple has started talks with music publishers for the appropriate licenses that would allow it to pursue such a service. It sounds like Apple basically is looking to apply its “genius” function to music in the cloud. And with the rise of customized, streaming music services, it’s possible Apple is looking for ways to defend its music turf.

We know Apple is looking to integrate iCloud and iTunes. Apple knows what music you like based on iTunes downloads, and it knows what music you listen to most. It could try to take that data and recommend songs that stream via iCloud like a radio instead of only recommending songs to purchase, which iTunes already has. It could be that Apple is paying attention to trends that show a lot of people are starting to feel about music the way they feel about digital video content: they want it, they just don’t care if they own it.

The WSJ says Apple’s considered different ways to customize music services before. Here’s how the current idea, again still in the early negotiation stages, would work:

The company has in the past contemplated and abandoned other interactive features, including a Spotify-like service that would have let users rent unlimited amounts of music for a fixed monthly fee. But people familiar with the current talks say they appear to be more serious than those previous tentative inquiries.

As on Pandora, the music would be interspersed with ads, in this case carried by Apple’s iAd platform, which syndicates ads to iPhone and iPad apps.

Building such a service has its risks. While Apple’s success with iTunes is inarguable, its record is spottier when it attempts to build services tangential to iTunes: both Ping and iTunes Match fell flat. And Podcasts, even now upgraded, has some users incredibly frustrated.

But if it wants to avoid being disrupted or out-innovated, it probably feels it has to try something. Apple is very likely aware of its vulnerability when it comes to iTunes: It’s clunky software that encompasses so much more than music: it’s videos, apps, podcasts, iTunes U and more. Apple could be looking for a fresh way to appeal to users who’d rather use a simple, music-focused app customized to their music preferences like Spotify.

Though web radio is popular, it doesn’t make that much money. Luckily for Apple it has a lot of that already; plus Apple might not have a choice if it wants to keep music lovers around.

iTunes’ share of individual songs is still 85 percent of the digital music market. But with the popularity of Spotify, Pandora and others, Apple probably wants to find a way to keep its customers from wandering outside its ecosystem because it has no cloud-based music streaming service. Which is, of course, pretty much Apple’s basic M.O., as seen with the moves it’s made in iOS 6, OS X Mountain Lion and iCloud: don’t give customers a reason to go anywhere else.

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Spotify plays its most requested tune: an iPad app

Ryan Kim — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:00:52 +0000

While Spotify has been churning out news, one question kept popping up: when are we going to get an iPad app?

Well, Spotify is finally crossing this off its to-do list, giving users a polished iPad app that is meant to rule the living room and give people more reasons to discover music.

The iPad app, which supports the new retina display, doesn’t bring any new content or functionality to the table, but does introduce a fresh user interface that has been built around a concept of “half stacks”, where users can pull in new screens from the right, which take up half the display.

It’s good for exploring more content because each selection presents new visual stuff to look at. For instance, you can play a song and then pull up a page for the artist. Clicking on the biography opens a new screen, pushing the artist page to the left. Then if you click on any links in the actual bio or click on related artists, it spawns yet a new screen. This can go on forever if you want.

Designed for the living room

The list of functions is familiar to existing iPhone app users. While navigating through the app, music can always be managed by controls at the bottom of the screen. But if you want to make the iPad the showcase of your living room party, you can expand the player to full screen, with the cover art taking up 2/3 of the real estate. Users who want to take advantage of Airplay, meanwhile, have the option from this screen to stream their music to another device.

The What’s New tab offers a carousel of recommended music based on your listening habits. There’s a more conventional list view of trending songs and top tracks followed by thumbnails of new album releases. On the Playlist tab, the left panel is a simple list of playlists with thumbnails, while the right panel offers bigger artwork and a list of songs.

Exploration is improving on the iPad version, though. The search function has been sped up with predictive typing, and the results can pull up friends as well as musical results. The inbox can also group messages from individual friends together, and allow users to play shared music from the inbox.

So why now?

The iPad has been a frequent request of users and has been the top idea on Spotify’s community site for some time. Charlie Hellman, director of product development for Spotify, told me the team took its time with the iPad app, trying to make sure it was more than a rehash of the iPhone app. And the company also had a lot on its plate, with recent announcements like a new Android app , a web play widget and a Coke marketing partnership, he said.

Driving deep usage

Hellman said with its more visual interface, the iPad app should invite a lot more deep usage, with people delving into the app instead of just keeping it on in the background. The experience is designed to keep pushing users down the rabbit hole as they find more music to listen to. He expects people to listen to music directly through the iPad but also connect it to larger devices for playback in the home.

“We wanted to create an experience on the couch so while you’re listening to music, you can browse and navigate through to get more context and find related artists,” said Hellman.

The iPad app takes some key features from the iPhone, like high quality 320 kbps music streaming and offline syncing, and it also introduces gapless playback and crossfade from the desktop app. It’s possible that some of the iPad UI elements will migrate over to the other apps as well when appropriate, said Hellman.

But the iPad version is not for everyone. The app will not support third-party apps like the desktop version, but it’s something Hellman said we’ll have to stay tuned for. And it won’t incorporate the updated radio feature built into the desktop app. And, since the iPad app is built on iOS and is considered a mobile device, new users will have to get the $9.99 premium service to play music.

Gives people what they want

I like the feel of the app overall and it’s a big improvement over a blown up iPhone experience. There is still some adjustment with the half stack UI and figuring out how things can be manipulated. I do think there could be more opportunity to bring in additional content or more artwork to make the app more like an interactive coffee table book. I enjoy reading the artist bio information, which is not available on the iPhone app, but it took me a second to figure out how to call up that information.

The iPad app should drive more casual sustained usage around the home and may help convert more users into paying subscribers. Spotify said last month it had 10 million users on its free ad-supported service and 3 million paying subscribers. Compared to some of its other recent overhyped announcements, Spotify is finally giving people what they want.

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Spotify partners with Coke to expand international reach

Ryan Kim — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:24:04 +0000

Spotify unveiled a global partnership with Coca Cola Wednesday that it says will greatly expand its international reach and exposure, giving it a boost similar to the way its Facebook integration has supercharged sign-ups and usage. Under the deal, Coca Cola will use Spotify to help power its international music campaigns, giving Coke fans a way to experience new content and music created and curated by the beverage company. Spotify, however, had no new information on an eagerly awaited iPad app.

The initial signs of partnership will be a Coca Cola branded app that will appear on Spotify’s desktop app, and content from that app will also appear on Coke’s Facebook page. The app was selected from a hackathon this past weekend and will be ready in time for the Summer Olympics. Coca Cola will also utilize Spotify as part of a global music campaign next year, which will include TV, digital and other marketing efforts.

The partnership doesn’t include direct payments from Coca Cola to Spotify. But Coke is expected to increase its advertising spending on Spotify as it promotes its app and expanded content. For Coke, the deal helps it better use music to get closer to its customers. It’s got music programs around the world, from live concerts to partnerships with big events like the World Cup and the Olympics. For Spotify, it means Coke will help promote it as the service moves into new markets beyond the 13 countries it currently operates in.

“If you think about our vision, it’s about the ubiquity of music, and I can’t think of a brand or company that has the same amount of ubiquity as Coke,” said Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder, at an event in New York.

It’s unclear how much this will improve Spotify’s financial situation. The company doubled its losses to $60 million last year. Even with expanded distribution, it will still be on the hook for bigger payments to labels. Getting more advertising will certainly help pay the bills, but it’s not clear how big that revenue source will be. So far, Spotify has paid more than $250 million to the labels overall. Spotify currently has 10 million users on its free ad-supported service and 3 million paying subscribers.

But clearly, Spotify is working to get closer to brands. Earlier Wednesday, Spotify founder Daniel Ek confirmed that Spotify is turning on the ability for brands like McDonalds and AT&T to make their own apps on top of Spotify’s platform, letting the them create new experiences around its catalog of 15 million songs. This follows Spotify’s move in November to open up its platform to third-party apps including apps from Rolling Stone, Last.fm, SongKick and others. The service is still limited to just apps built off of Spotify’s desktop app.

AT&T is one of the first out of the gate with a “Surround Sounds,” app, which shows where songs were written, recorded, played or performed, so users can see the music visually on a map. Reebok has an app that creates workout playlists while Intel has an app called “Sifter” that recommends songs, bands and artists based on what they’re friends are tuning into on Facebook. The apps will show up in the coming weeks.

These branded apps are free to build but the hope is that they will help attract more advertising dollars to the platform, similar to the way Facebook pulls in advertising dollars from brands building off its social network.

Spotify released some new usage figures including the fact that since integrating into Facebook, it’s had 1.5 billion shares from Spotify to Facebook and more than 500 billion impressions on Facebook. Users have spent the equivalent of 1,500 years on Spotify’s apps since the launch of its app platform. Users have created 700 million playlists on Spotify and are listening for 100 minutes a day.

As for a dedicated Spotify iPad app, Ek said it was still in the works.

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Monetizing music in the post-scarcity age

Mark Mulligan — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:55:26 +0000

On-demand streaming is only one part of a much broader transition taking place in the digital music industry: the shift from analog media business models to the age of digital consumption. This research note discusses that shift in light of the current music industry, where the iTunes digital download leads the market but will not necessarily lead the future. Simply put, the audio file alone is no longer the product. Instead, the experiences built around it are, and as we discuss here, services like Spotify, Facebook, Topspin and others are leading the way into this new era of dynamic, interactive and social music.

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10 ways big data changes everything

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 19:52:32 +0000

Industries like Internet search, genomics, climate research and business analytics are starting to create massive data sets — in the petabyte and exabyte range — that are requiring an entirely new set of big data tools to manage. The emergence of this so-called big data phenomenon is also fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. On March 21 and 22, GigaOM is throwing an event about the future of this big data ecosystem in New York, and for the occasion, we have highlighted 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world.

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Forecast: the future of the digital music industry

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:55:33 +0000

The music industry has been in trouble for a long time. But now, aided by smartphone proliferation, new entrants are aggressively pushing alternative business models. This report examines the U.S. digital music market’s key disruption vectors: the areas where large market shifts are occurring and where companies will position themselves to gain share and increase revenues. These vectors will take some time to play out, but the overall industry should finally return to growth within the five-year forecast horizon, as digital music spending, driven by subscriptions, will average double-digit yearly growth to total $4.1 billion in 2015. Disruptive companies include Facebook, MOG and Pandora. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Amazon’s DynamoDB: rattling the cloud market

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:33:13 +0000

The latest AWS offering to rock the technology establishment is DynamoDB, a NoSQL database service that puts the power of NoSQL in the hands of every developer. This research note analyzes the multiple ways in which Amazon’s announcement has disrupted the big data and cloud computing market and what that means for other companies and offerings in the space — from the startups selling Hadoop distributions to public cloud providers like Rackspace and Microsoft, which will have to scramble to keep up and differentiate. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Cloudant, Heroku and VMware. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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