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 [...]

Five Music Predictions for 2010 (and Five Reasons Why 2009 was a Flop)

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] Lots happened in 2009 but it wasn’t a vintage [...]

MySpace Music UK: First Take

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] MySpace today launched its UK music offering, over a [...]

Spotify’s Marathon

The news that Spotify’s mobile app is now available for the Android platform, coupled with an anticipated Autumn US launch, are both part of the music service’s inexorable rise and media interest.  Spotify undoubtedly has momentum and potential in abundance.  But, even without considering the issue of cash burn, it is also important to keep [...]

The Three Things Spotify Needs to Do

Spotify is certainly the darling of the moment.  In the close to a decade that I’ve been covering the digital music space for Jupiter, and now Forrester, I have seen oh so many services come and go.  I’ve seen far fewer grab the limelight and hold it in the way Spotify is currently doing so.  [...]

Why Would Anyone Buy the Pirate Bay?

A small Swedish company Global Gaming Factory today announced the acquisition of the Pirate Bay.  The acquisition poses far more questions than it does answers. The acquisition was for $7.7 million, which the founders described as “great bit underneath its value”.  Which is kind of interesting considering that they argued strongly in court that the [...]

Why Napster’s New Pricing Strategy is More than Just Price Cuts

Napster has overhauled its pricing strategy in the US, selling pre-stored value cards in retail stores. It’s being widely reported as ‘Napster slashing prices’ but it’s more than just that.  The key things of note here are: It shifts the consumer focus onto downloads: each card has a pre-stored value for MP3 downloads as the [...]

Comes With Music Finally Gets Its Route To Market

Orange today announced they will be ‘exclusively’ providing Comes With Music on the Nokia 5800 in the UK.  Finally Nokia’s Come With Music gets the route to market it needs. I’ve long been a strong advocate of CWM and that belief remains intact despite reportedly poor sales to date.  Nokia always needed strong channel partner [...]

Spotify and Spiral Frog: Spot(ify) the Difference

Spotify reached another milestone at the weekend, clocking up a million users in the UK. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts Spotify’s success lies in doing what it does simply and well, not by doing anything particularly revolutionary (advanced caching technology arguably aside). But it is imperative that Spotify doesn’t go the way of Spiral [...]

Spotify, Scratching Beneath the Surface of the Numbers

The Financial Times today report that Spotify has 250,000 UK Internet Users have downloaded the streaming music application, and 800,000 worldwide. Not bad for an application which has only recently just stopped being invite-only. I’ve posted before on why Spotify has been so successful, now we have some numbers to measure that success by. First [...]