Spotify Looking To Add Video Streaming

Reports are that Spotify has been reaching out to top YouTube content creators and traditional media companies in an attempt to accrue content for a new streaming video feature. Although no specific date for the launch has been officially announced, many believe it will come by the end of the month.

The feature is said to be free and will take advantage of the existing advertising infrastructure that the company has set up for its streaming music service.

Spotify recently raised another round of investment said to be around $350 million on the basis of a total valuation of $8 billion. Speculation is that the introduction of video played a large part in raising the cash.

While it's difficult to make money with streaming music, video streaming (even if it's free) is another story, as more and more brands expand their advertising in that area. Of course, YouTube hasn't done too badly with that model either.

Another reason why Spotify might be going that route is from pressure brought by other streaming music services like TIDAL and Google Play, which also offer video. That said, Rdio also tried a video feature but abandoned it after 6 months.

Spotify also sees the upcoming competition from both Apple's new music service and from Google's Music Key, and views adding video as the best way weather the storm of their launches. That's also why we'll probably see a Spotify video launch sooner rather than later.

Whether the streaming service's new video feature will actually gain traction is another story.

---

Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this blog at no cost to you (just click here).

Google Now Provides Automatic Song Lyrics

For years dedicated lyric sites have been both the bane and glory of music publishers. If the lyrics were unlicensed, then that was obviously taking money form the the artists that the publisher represented as well as the publisher itself. Of course, if the lyrics were licensed then that was another source of income. As a result, quite a few fully licensed lyric sites like LyricFind and Musixmatch began to dominate the space.

They may be in for a rough time though, now that Google is incorporating lyrics into the results of any search for a song, as you can see from the graphic on the left. The lyrics are now part of Google Play (as you can see here for the Foo Fighters song) and are in a large database that's totally licensed from the publishers. No, you don't need to be a Google Play subscriber to access them.

Many of the current lyric sites are crowd sourced, so you can never be sure if the lyrics are correct or not. With Google's licenses in place, this is no longer the case, plus the lyrics are now easily accessible via the link in the search results.

Why did Google do this, you might ask? For Google, the search experience itself is paramount. You can see this in its rankings, where a page with a good user experience consistently ranks higher one where info is difficult to find. It seems that Google is using the same criteria on itself as well.

YouTube's Music Key Ups The Ante For Other Streaming Services

Today YouTube finally unveiled its long awaited Music Key subscription service and at least at first glance, other streaming music services should take notice. It offers a number of features that other services might not be able to easily offer, making it more difficult for a company to be able to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded space.

While it was common information that for a $10 per month fee, Music Key would allow the user ad-free and offline playback as well as the ability to listen in the background, what we didn’t know was that you’d also get access to the entire Google Play catalog too. This includes a large selection of not only audio, but video as well. Plus there’s also an abundance of playlists and the ability to listen and watch over compatible services like Sonos and Chromecast.

So why should the other services take more than a casual notice to the launch? First of all, its about video as much as audio. If there’s an enticement to get a heavy YouTube user to pay 10 bucks its getting rid of the pre-roll or popup banner ads when they watch a video. YouTube is already the most widely used service for consuming music online, and yes, you can still do that for free, but everyone hates the ads. I bet a lot of people will buy in for this reason alone.

On the other hand, many music lovers access YouTube to find primarily their favorite song. They don’t necessarily care about the video attached, and many times the video only shows a static picture anyway. While the main attraction for users may be the ad-free environment at first, that can quickly change once they’re exposed to the other features. You can keep a customer with one killer feature, but for every additional feature that he comes to rely on, it becomes increasingly more difficult to pry that user away to another service. Read more on Forbes.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Enough With The Apps Already!

I hate most iPad and iPhone apps. There, I said it. In this world we live in where jumping on the bandwagon is expected in order to keep up with the competition, every company or artistic project seems to be working on an app. And it’s not a good idea.

For one thing there are too many available already. In October Apple announced that there were one million apps available in the iTunes Store and a total of 60 billion had been downloaded already. Shortly before that, Google announced that there were 900,000 available from Google Play and over 50 billion Android apps downloaded. That figure has no doubt increased to match Apple’s by now. 

Besides the fact that we’re already inundated, the real problem is that most apps (except for games and utility apps) don’t work as well as the website they hope to replace. I’ve gotten to the point where I just use the browser on my tablet and phone instead of most apps that I’ve installed, which leaves the tiny programs taking up space in the background (I have to get around to deleting them soon).

Sports is a great example, with dozens of apps for every individual genre, and for the most part, every one that I’ve tried is frustrating. I keep on going back to ESPN on the browser for game updates. In fact, even ESPN’s own app isn’t as good as its website. Read more on Forbes.

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

The Next Era Of The Music Business

Regardless if you're a musician or music consumer, your music life is about to change. Slowly but surely digital music distribution has been evolving from downloads to streaming, but that transition has been really picking up speed over the last 12 months. With Spotify leading the way thanks to reams of publicity, more and more consumers are finding that the joy of renting music beats owning it by a long shot.

While it's been long rumored that Apple has their own streaming service up their sleeve, several developments reveal the change that is about to come.

First is the fact that Jimmy Iovine's Daisy project (named after the first computer generated song) just received a $60 million injection from the likes of Warner Music Group's owner Len Blavatnik, Fort Worth billionaire Lee Bass and Australian financier James Packer. This is a serious investment by some deep pockets that know what they're doing and don't like to lose. Then comes word that Apple's Tim Cook recently took a meeting with Iovine to be briefed on the project. Does that mean a collaboration? We don't know, but at the very least, Apple has a good working relationship with Iovine, since he was one of the first to sign Universal Music onto iTunes back in 2001. Together they'd be a powerhouse, a true 1200 pound gorilla. Chances are that Apple will chose to go it alone and just stay at 800 pounds though. It doesn't need a partner, but if there's something there worth buying, they have lots of money.

Then comes word that Google has been quietly making deals with all the major labels for their own YouTube-based subscription streaming service to be launched later in the year.

If all this were happening a couple of years ago we would've looked to only one of these prospective services to be left standing at some point, with the others falling by the wayside. But this is a different time, with the streaming business far more mature thanks to the likes of Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Slacker, et al. It's now probably possible that all of these new services survive if they're at least half-way decent in their user operation and offerings.

This is definitely going to be a big win for consumers, with nearly an unlimited selection of songs available for a relatively small monthly fee (not sure what the price point will end up being, but $9.95 keeps being mentioned). Consumers are quickly seeing the advantages of renting their music.

It will be a different story for artists and songwriters however. By now everyone knows how little the royalty can be from a stream, with stories abounding about income lost by the writer and artist. Although a full transition to streaming will be a godsend for the labels, with steady monthly income actually bolstering their bottom line, you can bet that not much of that will trickle down to the artists - at least at first.

It's not going to happen overnight, but within a matter of time, you'll see the entirety of the management and law categories of the music business devise a better way to get paid, and eventually force the labels to fall in line. And when that happens, it will trickle down to the DIYers who insist on doing it their way. To what degree this all takes place, we'll have to wait and see.

While this blog is aptly named Music 3.0, we're about to see the next stage of the music business. Welcome to Music 3.5!

----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Interested in the Music 3.0 archives? Buy The Music 3.0 Guide To Social Media. The best of over 800 posts.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Online Music Store Differences

It seems like every year we look at the differences between the big 3 music stores of Amazon MP3, Google Play and iTunes, and every year they're the same in some ways, and different in others. While subscription streaming music is trending in an upward direction, it's nowhere near critical mass yet, so buying downloads is still a big business. PC World recently ran a great article regarding the latest state of the download content business and below you'll find the salient points of the post.

• Tablets now allow new access to the online music stores, with the Nexus Q and Android tablet providing direct access to a Google Play stream, Kindle Fire to Amazon's music and video stores, and of course, and the iPad for Apple's iTunes.

• All stores have lots of content. iTunes now has over 28 million songs, Amazon hosts more than 20 million, and Google Play isn't saying exactly, but it's plenty more than you can listen to in a lifetime.

• The pricing really varies. Current songs and movies are pretty much the same across all 3, but catalog in both music and video varies.

• The real differences between them all is in the video offerings. Each service has a different idea of what the pricing and features model should be, with rentals and HD offerings differing.

Check out this chart for some clarity.

The article goes into detail on some of the differences, especially on the video side, so be sure to take a look if that's important to you.

-----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.