A Call Out to Early Stage Music Start-Ups

Just a reminder that the deadline for applications for the Music Industry Blog Start Up Showcase is the 31^st May.  If you’re an early stage music start-up (of any flavour, shape or kind) then follow this link to information on what you need to do to enter the Showcase competition.

We’ve got a stellar voting panel together which will be announced shortly.  Winners will be announced in late June.

Finally Someone Builds a Digital Music Service the Way It’s Meant to be Built!

Regular readers will know that I’ve been a long-term and vocal advocate of radical music product innovation.  There have been modest encouraging steps from a diverse mix of places, such as iTunes Pass, Topspin, Open EMI, Björk’s ‘Biophilia’ app, Swedish House Mafia’s ‘One’ app, Pledge Music etc.  All have edged forward disparate aspects of music product strategy but they have also all lacked a unifying framework to pull them together.  Today comes the first stab at a music service that pulls together many of those parts.  But it doesn’t come from one of digital music’s big players, nor from a major record label, but instead New York dance label Fools’ Gold Records with their Fools Gold: The Goldmine subscription service.

[EDIT: The Goldmine is powered by Drip.FM]

Subscribers get new and old music, curated content, remixes, DJ sets, extras, merchandize discounts, priority access to events and more.    This is almost exactly the list of product features that I laid out for the Music Product Manifesto back in 2009 so it should come as no surprise as quite how enthusiastic I am about the offering.

The reason I listed those attributes three years ago was that this broad selection of multimedia assets truly reflect what an artist is in the 21^st century, so much more so than a CD or a download does.  They are also the assets which labels (majors in particular with their 360 deals) are increasingly becoming active in.  It is little short of a travesty that more has not been done until now.  Hopefully Fools Gold’s innovation bravery will help nudge the industry wide needle forward.

Of course it is much easier for a small label like Fools Gold to pull together the disparate artist assets necessary to create the holistic offering, but as I argued in my presentation to Midem in 2011, “the scale of the potential rewards is more than big enough to justify the sizeable effort: what is at stake is the entire future of premium music products.”

The Goldmine also ticks most of the boxes of my DISC principles that I laid out in my Music Format Bill of Rights (see figure):

Dynamic:  One of the things I like most about the service is its guarantee to deliver every new release on the label automatically to the user.  This is what music products need to do in the digital age, pushing relevant content to the consumer rather than relying on them to pull.

Interactive.  The service includes accapellas and remix stems for users to step out of passive listening into active creation.  This of course works perfectly for the dance music audience where a large share of the audience are aspiring DJs and producers.  A great next step would be some in built functionality that allows even the most novice user to play around with stems, perhaps  in the context of a social gaming environment.

Social. This seems to be the only key DISC element not catered for by the Goldmine, but they certainly have the building blocks to deliver on this, most notably the membership base.

Curated.  Fools Gold curate tracks from the archive as part of the service and in addition deliver exclusive content and extra content.

The Goldmine isn’t the full package, nor does it signify a turning point in music product strategy (because that requires major record labels to jump on board), but it does represent the bravest innovation step yet taken.

Fools Gold just set the standard for the rest to follow.

Spotify Hits 20 Million Monthly Users and Could be on Track for 8 Million Paid Users 1 Year From Now

When Facebook flicked the switch on stage two of its Socially Optimized Web Strategy at f8 it was clear that the social network had just found an effective means of embedding itself further into all of our digital lives, by making itself the universal content dashboard.  What wasn’t so clear at that time was quite how significant an impact it would have on music services, Spotify in particular.

Today Spotify hit 20 million monthly users on its Facebook app, having added 500,000 new users in less than two weeks,  from the 3^rd to the 15^th of May (see figure 1).

Spotify has added 1.5 million users since the end of April, representing a growth rate of 8%.  That compares to 0.5 million new users and 4% growth for the entire month of May in 2011.  Facebook integration, coupled with launching in the US has turbo charged Spotify’s growth trajectory.

And yet, as impressive as Spotify’s total user growth is, it is only par when compared with other streaming music services.  Looking at the growth in total users by month since launch date of service (see figure 2) Spotify is close to the average for streaming music services.

In fact it is only above Pandora and lags imeem  and Last.FM, both of whom were once the future too.  In favour of Spotify, services like Pandora first launched in the US – a much larger addressable audience – and have unlimited free tiers.  Against Spotify, the market is now much more mature in terms of technology and consume readiness. Measuring against current user levels, 20 million users is also a long way south of Pandora’s 100 million users.  3 million paying subscribers is also far off Apple’s 80 million iTunes customers, though the comparison isn’t necessarily apples-to-apples (pun fully intended).

All of this is not to say that Spotify’s growth rate should be questioned but instead to put it into appropriate historical context, namely that Spotify is performing at the rate that streaming music services should perform in their first 40 months.  Not more, not less.

What is different about Spotify, is the need to amass new free users to drive premium subscriptions (see figure 3).

Although Spotify officially quotes 10 million registered users (the same number it first reported in December 2010) it is more instructive to look at paid conversion as a share of the 20 million monthly users reported by Facebook.  (Bear in mind that Spotify first quoted 10 million users back in December 2010, long before the US launch or Facebook integration).

Even with the 20 million users measure, 17% stands out as a highly successful conversion ratio for Spotify, an affirmation of the Freemium model.  Not only that, the conversion rate has grown strongly month upon month.  Spotify has been getting progressively better at converting free users to paid.  The conversion from active users to paid is even more impressive: 27%.

However it is also clear that the acceleration in new user acquisition enabled by Facebook integration is beginning to dent the conversion rate (see figure 4).

This is though just a natural byproduct of rapidly expanding the funnel: these new free users need to have time to get hooked on the service and then get migrated over to paid. The rate of new users is so much higher than previously that it will take time for Spotify’s overall metrics to balance out.  But that should indeed happen.  And if it does , then it augurs well for positive premium growth down the line.

If Spotify converts between 17% and 27% of each of the new daily 45,454 users, it will add between  0.7 and  1.1 million new paid users a quarter, or between 4.8 and 4.5 million a year.  Assuming a 27% conversion rate of these new active users, Spotify could have just over 8 million paying subscribers by May 2013 and 36 million total users.  The lower case, and probably more realistic, 17% conversion rate scenario would result in 6.3 million paying subscribers.

Although the rates and ratios will fluctuate over the coming 12 months, these numbers give us a useful directional sense of the long term impact of Facebook on Spotify’s current growth metrics.  There remains a big question over the scale of the actual addressable market, i.e. is there a demand ceiling that Spotify will hit somewhere south of the 5 million paying subscribers mark?  But ceiling or no ceiling, and low or high conversion scenario, there is one inescapable conclusion, namely that Facebook integration is transforming Spotify’s business, fast.

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These charts and the above analysis feature in a brand new Music Industry Blog free report: ‘ When 2+2=Free: Making Streaming Music Add Up’.  The report is free of charge to Music Industry Blog subscribers.  To receive your copy simply subscribe to email updates of this blog using the box to the upper left of this page.

The Long Tail Will East Itself: Covers and Tributes Make Up 90% of Digital Music Service Catalogues

In the early days of digital music, stores and services fell over themselves to boast about their burgeoning catalogue sizes.  Back then, when majors didn’t license widely, it really was something of an achievement to break the 1 million tracks mark, catalogue size was often a good indicator of the comparative breadth of choice among services.  But by the second half of the last decade, most of the majors had most of their catalogue online in most of the stores and services.  Independent labels lagged for a number of reasons but the majority of the independents (by market share) were also on the majority of services by this stage.  And yet since then, the average catalogue size of digital music services has grown from 4.3 million in 2008 to 16.4 million in 2012.  What fuelled this new catalogue arms race? It would be nice to think it was down to labels digitizing vast quantities of back catalogue, or even because of a surge of semi-pro artists.  The answer though, or at least the lion’s share of it, is much less appealing. Digital catalogues are so much bigger now because of filling and fluffing from covers, tributes and karaoke tracks.

Covers and Tributes Make Up 90% of Digital Music Service Catalogues

To test the theory I looked at the available tracks on iTunes for 10, randomly selected, top tier artists (see figure).  The startling key takeaway is that on average just 10% of the tracks listed for an artist is actually music by that artist.  And bear in mind that many of those tracks are duplicates.  The average U2 song for example, is listed multiple times ranging from original albums, remastered albums, EPs, greatest hits, compilations etc.

The vast majority of the remainder of tracks listed for an artist is filler drivel, endless cover versions, tribute acts and karaoke tracks.  As Peter Robinson highlighted in 2009, many of these cover versions sound all but identical to the original, while others have full intent on being identikit copies but poor musicianship and production leaves them sounding pitifully poor.  In among there are the occasional example of leftfield creativity, such as ‘Bass Parodies of Coldplay’ by Joe Bob’s Upright Bass Trio.  But artistic expression is hardly being tested with the likes of ‘Yoga to Coldplay’, ‘Led Zepellin Lullabys’ or ‘Dance Tribute to Lady Gaga vs Black Eyed Peas’.

When the Long Tail Goes Untouched

So just how much of the current 16.4 million songs on digital services are ‘the real deal’?  Back in 2008 24/7’s CEO Frank Taubert stated that 66% of his service’s 4.5 million tracks had never even been downloaded once (and remember these are the guys who power the vastly successful TDC Play unlimited free music service). That means that just 1.5 million tracks had been played, which is pretty close to the 1.6 million tracks we get if we apply the 10% rule across the entire 16.4 million catalogue count.

The number is probably bigger than that though.  eMusic responded to Taubert’s 66% claim with their own: that 75% of their 4 million tracks had been downloaded at least once.  But even if we take a straight average of the two (i.e. 44% of catalogue is untouched) we are still short of the complete picture.  Because even those tracks that have been played at least once will include multiple versions of the same song (e.g. album version vs single version).  Nielsen underscored the dynamic in 2009 when they reported that 3.6 million tracks sold less than 100 copies and just 1% of tracks were responsible for 80% of sales.

The Pseudo Long Tail is Killing the Real Long Tail

It is at this stage we start to see the core of the problem.  The short head will always dominate the long tail, but no more so than when the genuine long tail (the experimental artists, the up and coming, the niche genres) gets drowned out by the pseudo long tail of karaoke and 3^rd rate covers.

Discovery in the long tail is already a potentially market-crippling problem.  It is time for music services to stand up and be (down) counted.  16.4 million songs means nothing if the vast majority is useless filler.  This is not to say that there isn’t a place for this strata of bottom-feeder music, but that place is not as part of the main results of original artists.  At the very least music services should file those tracks away in their own section.  But even if they can’t bring themselves to do that, they should stop listing these tracks in total catalogue sizes. The 90% filler tracks paint a misleading and confusing picture of digital music availability.  The best solution of all though is for music services to do away with them all together, and if there is really a market need for them, then let some niche player fill that gap instead of blighting real music services.

Blocking the Pirate Bay: A Tale of VPNs, Proxy Servers and Carrots

Today the UK’s High Court ruled that UK ISPs must block access to the Pirate Bay on their networks.  The idea isn’t a new one, Wippit’s CEO Paul Myers first touted the idea of UK ISPs voluntarily blocking access to P2P sites nearly a decade ago.  In some ways it is intriguing that it has taken so long for media industries to come round to the idea of enforcement via domain blocking rather than going straight after file sharers themselves.  The Sopa / Pipa legislation had many faults but it was markedly more forward looking with its focus on blocking domains than the old school French Hadopi bill which opts instead for the ‘punish your own customers’ approach.

Of course domain blocking itself is beset with challenges and moral dilemmas, but of the tools available to media companies domain blocking can make a pretty compelling case for being the best blend of effectiveness and consume friendliness.  After all, the aim of any piracy enforcement is not just to stop the activity but also to persuade illegal downloaders to become paying customers.  It is much easier to try to convert a file sharer who is getting frustrated not being able to find free unlicensed downloads than it is one who you have just taken to court and sued for damages.

There are however two key technical challenges surrounding domain blocking:

• VPNs: Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications can enable a user to tunnel out of their ISPs’ network, bypassing domain filtering systems such as BT’s Cleanfeed system which will be used to implement the Pirate Bay ban. Although VPNs have well established legitimate business uses, a number of VPN providers, such as BT Guard, are positioning themselves explicitly as tools to evade piracy enforcement. VPN providers may become the next front in the war on piracy, with media companies likely to start subpoenaing their user activity logs.  Some providers have already started putting anonymity systems in place, such as not tracking IP addresses and deleting logs after 7 days.  Proxy servers – which can be used to circumvent domain filters – are another option, often used in conjunction with VPNs.
• New domains: the most challenging aspect of domain filtering is keeping track of all the new domains.  Earlier this month in Belgium the Antwerp Court of Appeal imposed a Pirate Bay domain block on two Belgian ISPs, a band which covered 11 associated domains.  Within days the Pirate Bay had registered a new domain depiraatbaai.be though that was swiftly added to the ruling and Belgian users now get this message if they try to access any of the Pirate Bay domains.  The Belgian example illustrates how easy it is for new domains to come into play.  Effective domain filtering is an iterative and continual process that can only work well with willing cooperation from ISPs.  Going to the High Court to secure a new ruling every time there is a new domain is simply not viable.

The aim of domain blocking, as with all piracy enforcement measures, is not to turn off the tap entirely but instead to make it so inconvenient for mass market consumers that the activity will become unappealing.  So the technical challenges need not be fatal flaws in domain filtering strategy if the net result irritating inconvenience for most users.

The Pirate Bay has had the unusual effect of creating a centralization of activity for decentralized file sharing.  As networks went decentralized to evade enforcement, the Pirate Bay pulled the Torrent diaspora together to create a nice big juicy target for media companies.  Removing the Pirate Bay from the UK web will have a significant impact on file sharing, at least in the short term.  There are only a handful of other public sites that index torrent files and have a working tracker, though there is a longer list of sites that have indices but not trackers.  If the music industry acts quickly and puts something new and compelling in place to capture the demand of frustrated Pirate Bay users then there is a strong chance that a host of new digital music customers can be won.  But that means a new generation of product.  The 99 cent download and 9.99 subscription have proven patently uninteresting to the majority of digital music consumers (by which I mean people who listen to music digitally and / or access it digitally).

The alternative is the risk of some of those users simply falling out of the music consumption arena (as appears to have happened in the US) with the rest soon being catered for by a host of new unlicensed alternatives filling the demand vacuum.

A carrot and stick approach is always going to be an evolving strategy.  But when the stick changes, so must the carrot.

Announcing the Music Industry Blog Start-Up Showcase

Over the last few months I’ve had conversations with a lot of really exciting early-stage music start- ups with a refreshingly diverse array of products and propositions.  Many of them though share the same problem: the challenge of getting from great idea and team to market awareness.  So, as this blog is read widely by investor and music industry decision makers alike I’ve decided to do my little bit by launching the Music Industry Blog Start-Up Showcase.

Over the next month I will be taking submissions for inclusion from *music* start-ups.  I’m specifically interested in early stage music start-ups, so if you are pre-funding, seed and / or chasing Series A then you could be just the sort of company to be featured in the showcase.  (There might be the occasional case for a later stage company to be included but there will have to be a very strong case).

The most important criteria of all though, is that your business is interesting, exciting and is doing something different.  That doesn’t mean you have to be a unique service or business model (though that would be great).  It does however mean that you must at least have a unique approach, a novel twist.

If you are interested in taking part then please answer the questions below and send them to me directly at musicindustryblog AT gmail DOT COM

Closing date for entries is 31^st May.  I will only be selecting the best of the entries for inclusion so I can’t guarantee your inclusion.  I will also be strict in applying impartiality, so that means even if I’m working with your start-up in an advisory capacity it doesn’t mean that you will necessarily be included, (sorry!).  For sake of full disclosure I will state clearly if I am advising for, or have been so at any stage, any of the start-ups selected for inclusion.

If you have any questions, queries or concerns please feel free to send me an email or reach out to me on Twitter @mulligan_mark

Music Start-Up Criteria

If you would like your start-up included in the showcase please answer and submit the following.

What capacity are you representing the company in?

The express elevator pitch (what you do in *one* sentence)

What problem are you solving / why does the music industry need you?

What is your business model?

What is unique about what you are doing?

Who do you see as your main competitors and why can you do things better than them?

Why do consumers and / or businesses need your service(s)?

Where do you want to be in 2 years’ time?

What investment stage are you at (boot strapping, seed, series A) and who are your investors?

250 words on your company (include things like management team, value proposition, go-to-market strategy, clients/partners, etc.)

Company URL(s)

Deezer and Digital Music’s Squeezed Middle

It’s been a busy week for Deezer: first came the announcement of an browser-based streaming partnership with niche music publication Artrocker, then came Deezer’s launch in Canada, New Zealand and Australia – the next chapter in Deezer’s world domination plan.  Now to complete a hat-trick of announcements the French streaming service has announced a partnership with T-Mobile in Austria, with the possibility of further Central European roll outs.  Of the three announcements this is the one with the greatest strategic significance.

The Third Way for Digital Music

Regular readers will know that I’ve been advocating subsidized and bundled music services for many years now.  Bundled services square the circle of more people listening to more music than ever but fewer of them paying than ever before.  Bundled music services are the ‘Third Way’ for digital music (see figure).  Currently the digital music market is polarized between a fight for the top and a fight for the bottom.  iTunes, Rhapsody et al have built businesses around the relatively small group of tech-savvy music aficionados who pay for digital music, while We7, Pandora et al are catering for the appetite of free music fans (though still grappling with how to create profitable businesses with such large chunks revenue going on royalty payments). Lost in between are those music fans who are engaged enough to want more than ad supported, PC-tethered music but who don’t want to pay 4.99 upwards for the privilege.  For as long as the squeezed middle remains un-catered for, the total market will remain stuck in decline or stodgily slow growth.

But this macro concept is a business-critical problem for companies Deezer and Spotify who target the top tier but rely on the bottom layer for customer acquisition and brand extension.  The problem with using free music as your marketing funnel is that you attract lots of music fans who love unlimited streaming but have no interest or ability to pay a monthly subscription fee.  Freemium services need something between free and paid – without it half of their marketing efforts are wasted.

Bundled Services More Often Than Not Don’t Add Up for Telcos

The solution for Deezer and Spotify, as well as for the wider market, is to create bundled services where the consumer pays little or no direct fee for the music.  (Fighting free with free itself). Instead the cost is hidden within another subscription fee and / or subsidized by a third party looking for gains to their core products. Telcos have long been the best fit, but nearly exactly four years since TDC’s Play service was launched, telco subsidized music services are conspicuously thin on the ground.  Spotify’s partnerships with Telia Sonera and 3, along with Deezer’s France Telecom tie-in and Cricket Wireless’ Muve Music are lonely examples.

So if the concept makes so much sense to the music industry and to the music services, why haven’t more bundled services come to market?  The simple answer is economics: telcos (ISPs in particular) just can’t make the business case work.  Margins are already tight, and in highly competitive marketplaces pricing is often locked into a race to the bottom.  It is often just too difficult for a telco to build a consumer pricing package that doesn’t price it out of the mainstream market but at the same time covers the wholesale costs of rights licenses.

Of course music is viewed as a marketing tool rather than an ARPU tool by most telcos, so it is typical for a portion (sometimes all) of the costs are funded out of marketing budgets.  But experience shows us that few telcos have been willing to swallow enough of the costs, seeing much better ROI on alternatives such as Apps and Games.  A number of European ISPs have told me that they could only build a business case around a cost to the consumer of 2 euros a month, far south of what rights fees for unlimited music services require.

So how have Deezer managed to pull off the T-Mobile partnership?  Here’s how:

• Deezer have deep experience of integrating with telcos, knowing how their businesses work and understanding their needs
• Deezer have a track record of making bundled telco offerings work
• T-Mobile have identified the Austrian market as one in which they can achieve differentiation and market advantage through a bundled play.  T-Mobile gets to call itself “the first operator in Austria to offer an unlimited music service in its mobile tariffs”, to gain and retain young mobile audiences.

The third factor is the key one.  Without having a telco partner willing to go out on a limb, all of experience and assets in the digital music world add up to naught. But even once you’ve got a telco on board, making the project a success is no easy task.  I’ve seen up close a number of telco music services nearly but not quite get to market because of complications with commercials and because of conflicting interests among partners.  I sincerely hope that the T-Mobile and Deezer partnership is fruitful – the marketplace desperately needs more proofs of concept of the bundled music model.  Without the ‘Third Way’ the music market will continue its unhealthy polarization between premium and free, leaving the squeezed middle high and dry.

And Then There Was the Facebook Play Button…

Last week we saw the launch of the Facebook Timeline for Artists and the Spotify Play Button, neither of which were without controversy (click on the links for more).  Now we have the two trends pulled together with the Facebook Listen Button.  The Facebook Listen Button gives artists a Listen button integrated into the front-end of their profile page which when clicked starts their music playing in the music app of the user.

The Good News: Elegant User Experience

• This is an elegantly simple integration, that is uncluttered and allows a user to achieve their goal quickly and simply
• It brings further consistency to Facebook artist pages, putting into practice the lessons learned from the anarchic chaos that was MySpace artist pages
• It will help drive usage of streaming music services

The Bad News: Problematic Integration

• The same player-integration issues apply to the Facebook Listen Button as do to the Spotify Play Button: a visitor has to a) be a user of one of the supported streaming music services and then b) has to have the app open.  Both of which are speed bumps in the user experience, especially if the visitor isn’t a user of a supported music service, perhaps because they live in a country where the services aren’t yet available
• Following being shunted off the artist profile front page by the Timeline, artist apps like BandPage, Reverb Nation and FanRX have effectively had their usability further downgraded by their play buttons being a couple of clicks away from the front page compared to the front page click of the Facebook Listen Button

Conclusion

Overall the Facebook user wins here.  The Listen Button is not intended as the consumption mode of choice for aficionado fans, it is a quick discovery tool for people new to the artist who want to learn more.  And with this key use case in mind, the design and implementation is clean, elegant and (reasonably) convenient.  But the flip side is that those artist apps find themselves further let down by the implementation.  Strategically this matters not so much for those apps (though of course to the companies themselves it will feel like a kick in the ribs while on the floor) but instead for what it says about Facebook’s ecosystem and platform aspirations.  Though these apps are a miniscule detail in Facebook’s Socially Integrated Web Strategy, developers will be looking at their experience and trying to learn whether this is a precedent for how Facebook treats its developer partners or just a blip.  Facebook needs to ensure that it is the latter and that this is known clearly and widely.

For now, Facebook has momentum to spare and developers will willingly swallow the risk for a stab at reaching the largest single digital audience on the global web.  But Facebook’s Socially Integrated Web Strategy depends upon those developers helping ensure that momentum is maintained.  Long term Facebook needs the developers as much as they need it.  Facebook may be the future for now  but that confidence could be beginning to beget hubris.  Remember, MySpace used to be the future too.

What Happened to the RIAA’s Missing 3.5 Million?

The RIAA has highlighted research which indicates that its closure of P2P site Limewire has significantly reduced P2P levels in the US.  Unfortunately the evidence is not as clear cut as it may first appear.

According to the various sources the RIAA cites (mainly a combination of Nielsen and NPD data) the effects between September 2010 and September 2011 in the US of Limewire’s closure were:

• 95% reduction in usage of Limewire by its users
• Total P2P users declined by 9 million
• Total legal downloaders grew by 5.5 million

An immediately apparent trend is that 3.5 million P2P users appear to have disappeared entirely from the digital music consumption landscape (i.e. 9 million ‘lost’ P2P users minus the 5.5 million new paid downloaders).  For argument’s sake let’s assume that 100% of those consumers that abandoned P2P switched straight to paid downloads. That would mean that 39% just dropped out of digital music.  But of course a 100% transition is improbable.  Also many (the majority?) of the new downloaders will not have previously been P2P users.  So what happened to the missing 3.5 million?  The answer is found in a combination of three factors:

• P2P is a technology in decline for music piracy.  Consumers are going elsewhere, to what I term Non-Network piracy.  That is, activities such as Bluetoothing, harddrive swapping, phone ripping, darknets, binary groups, lockers etc.  Individually each activity is small but collectively this is where music piracy is heading.  I remember in my days as a JupiterResearch analyst that as we watched German P2P penetration decline steadily year-on-year in apparent response to music industry anti-piracy measures, we also saw Germany become Europe’s largest Non-Network Piracy market, actually exceeding P2P penetration.  And that is going back a lot of years now.  Today much more still needs to be done to better understand Non-Network Piracy, particularly so in the age of cloud-based music experiences.  Because the same arguments about ownership mattering less for legitimate services apply to piracy.  Downloading an MP3 file from BitTorrent may seem as incongruous to a Digital Native as buying a CD.  Measuring piracy effectively in the age of cloud means viewing illegal streaming services and even music blog streams in the same way as illegal downloads.
  Bottom Line: many of those missing 3.5 million will actually be happily sating their appetite for free unlicensed music via Non-Network Piracy.
• People lie.  I’ve been tracking music piracy for long enough to know that it is unwise to draw definitive conclusions about year-on-year trends.  In Sweden for example, in the early and mid-noughties P2P penetration dropped from 28% to 18% following the closure of a legal loophole and then again to 12% following government enforcement.  Within a couple of years penetration was back up in the mid 20’s%.  Furthermore the main ISP Telia reported that it had seen no noticeable decline in P2P traffic levels.  As Dr. House’s mantra goes ‘People Lie’.  On the one hand this proves that enforcement is effective in that it makes people conscious they are doing something wrong and don’t want to admit to it, until the heat dies off. But on the other it suggests that the impact can be superficial for many file sharers.  Though untruthful respondents should be less important for Nielsen’s panel methodology than NPD’s survey methodology, bear in mind that file sharers are often pretty savvy consumers who use dedicated computers for download.  So it is not unreasonable to expect many to switch their P2P activity from their metered PC for the same reason they wouldn’t admit to file sharing to a survey vendor.
  Bottom Line: surveys are better at measuring consumer attitudes to piracy than they are actual behaviour. 
• Limewire is closed! A 95% reduction in usage of Limewire by Limewire users sounds pretty impressive until you consider that the site was actually been closed down by the RIAA in October 2010.  Limewire agreed to ‘stop supporting and distributing’ its P2P client.  A number of unauthorized spin-off clients (such as LimeWire Pirate Edition) were created but a visit to Limewire’s site reveals a message urging users to refrain from using these apps and to remove them from their computers).
  Bottom Line:the majority of Limewire users unsurprisingly stopped using the defunct client. 
• P2P users are holding their breath. A significant share of the missing 3.5 million may well have stopped downloading illegally for now.  But if they are not buying downloads nor using Non-Network Piracy then they have markedly changed their music consumption behaviour,  perhaps increasing their use of YouTube, listening to more radio, watching more music TV.  For active music downloaders this means an effective dis-engagement from music, falling on the ‘supporting’ channels as their main behaviour.  This will have 1 of 3 long term outcomes: 1) they remain disengaged, casual music fans 2) they finally opt for legal services 3) they eventually go back to piracy.  Of the three, the third is the most likely outcome.
  Bottom Line: nature abhors a vacuum.

Whack-a-Mole Remains Firmly Game-On

The last factor is arguably the most important, particularly in the context of locker services running scared in the wake of the Megaupload arrests.  The demand for free music remains whatever happens to supply.  Closing most of the current illegal channels creates a demand vacuum that will unfortunately be filled, and the history of music piracy to date teaches us that what comes next will be even more difficult to enforce than its predecessor. However there is a fortuitously timed wildcard factor which may help aid the digital transition.  Since July 2011 Spotify has been available in the US, so many of those lost Limewire users may quench some or all of their free music thirst there.  But because we still don’t have any definitive data to suggest that Spotify is reducing piracy so we must keep Spotify as a wildcard for now.

The slightly depressing conclusion in all of this is that the Whack-a-Mole game is not over. But encouragingly the RIAA’s Joshua Friedlander states:

The single most important anti-piracy strategy remains innovation, experimentation and working with our technology partners to offer fans an array of legal music experiences.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Of course enforcement remains an important part of the mix, but there is an increasing risk of negative ROI (both in financial and publicity terms) that the music industry can ill afford at the moment. Closing down sites hits supply not demand. The solution to piracy lies first and foremost in innovating to meet those clearly demonstrated consumer needs.

Spotify Play Button: Digital Music’ Largest Marketing Funnel Just Got Bigger

A quick one….

Spotify today announced its new ‘Spotify Play Button’ feature.  As Giga Om Pro’s David Card Tweeted, it is ‘Spotify’s 1st baby step towards 2-way platform syndication’.  In a nutshell the feature enables publishers to post embedded song stream links on their sites, thus adding music context to their stories.  Publishers at launch include Vogue, GQ, The Guardian and NME.  Crucially the Play Button is not an audio embed but instead a link that will play music from Spotify’s servers, via a user’s Spotify app via the site.  Which means that if you don’t have Spotify you don’t get to listen to the music.

10 Million Users Translates to a Small Share of a Publisher’s Readership

As much as a success story as Spotify is, its 10 million users (or 17.5 million depending on which source you choose) are significant in digital music terms but tiny in Internet user terms. Which matters a lot to mainstream publishers such as Vogue and GQ who appeal to broad demographics.  Only a small share of their readers will actually have Spotify accounts, so the majority of their readers will, as I told the BBC, encounter user experience ‘speed bumps’.  Readers will either not be able to listen to music or instead will have to register for Spotify…assuming of course that they are Facebook users, otherwise they will have to register for Facebook first, and then Spotify.

So non-music specialist publishers (i.e. those whose readers will not in the main have Spotify) will likely get as much reader push back as they will positive feedback.  For Spotify though it is all win-win.  This is a smart customer acquisition tool.  Combined with the Facebook integration Spotify now arguably has the largest marketing funnel of any digital music service (YouTube, and by extension Vevo, excepted).  And this is what it is all about, as the following quote from the Spotify press release attests:

Anyone new to Spotify will be set up with the Spotify desktop app, which powers the button in the background, as soon as they start playing the music.

Another Step in Spotify’s ‘Music API’ Strategy

As I’ve argued before, Spotify want to become the API for Music.  This is part of that strategy.  Soundcloud should probably be concerned – though they are more than smart enough to find out a way to make their universal accessibility a highly visible differentiation point.  YouTube and Vevo though won’t be losing sleep.  The majority of user generated music links will continue to be YouTube embeds, as will the majority of publisher music links.  The web is becoming an ever more video-rich experience and music is no exception.

So, a small but smart move from Spotify that will do wonders for their user acquisition and ‘Music API’ strategies.  The case for publishers though is less clear cut.