Samsung and Meeting The Device Use Orbit Challenge

Two pieces of Samsung related news hit the wires this week: UK based music ASP 7 Digital (who powers the Music Hub app on Samsung’s Galaxy Tab) announced it has hit 1 million active mobile users (across all channel partners) and that 20% of its sales are now via mobile Leap Wireless announced that they [...]

BBM Music: First Take

Today Blackberry announced their anticipated BBM Music service, which it transpires is powered by white label cloud music stalwart Omnifone (who also power the likes of Sony and Vodafone). In short the service offers: 50 tracks per month for a £/$ 5.99 fee Is available to Blackberry Messenger (BBM) users Users’ tracks are available for [...]

Competing With Digital Music’s Triple A

Over the last two years the digital music stores-and-services-marketplace has consolidated and – with a few notable exceptions – stagnated. And as the likes of Comes With Music, Spiral Frog and imeem added to the ever growing list of failed but innovative start-ups, the queue of new entrants grew ever smaller.  Successive failures – due [...]

Why Digital’s Next Steps Can’t Be Baby Steps

What follows are highlights from my speech at the Westminster Forum on the UK Music Industry 2011 and Beyond I want to spend the next few minutes building the case that digital music is in a period of transition, a stage that presents us with a unique and ever narrowing window of opportunity to drive [...]

Spotify’s US Launch: First Take

Spotify finally today announced their excessively anticipated US launch. Protracted negotiations with the US labels turned this into one of digital music’s longest running sagas.  And although the $100 million of extra funding for label guarantees and advances seems to have successfully assuaged concerns, the labels weren’t just digging in their heels for the sake [...]

Making Freemium Pay: An Artist’s Perspective

With the much anticipated US launch of Spotify and the successful IPO of Pandora there’s a very palpable sense of momentum in streaming music.  And that’s great news, the future of music revenues will depend upon a successful transition from distribution based models (downloads, CDs etc) to consumption-era models (on-demand streaming etc.).  Yet, there’s a [...]

Spotify and Virgin Media Take The Third Way

UK cable broadband and TV provider Virgin Media and Spotify today announced the partnership deal they’ve been working on for some time.  The deal will ensure that Spotify is delivered across the web, mobile and TV to Virgin customers. On the surface this might not seem like such a big deal, but don’t be fooled, [...]

Can The Music Industry Afford Pandora to be the Shape of the Future?

The music industry has been following Pandora’s IPO with baited breath and has largely been encouraged by the degree to which the financial markets value one of the few true gems of the digital music space. But it doesn’t all smell of roses. Indeed Pandora’s Tim Westergren has made no secret of his concern over [...]

iTunes in the Cloud: A Great Start, But Just That

So Apple finally launched their much anticipated cloud music service, and they didn’t disappoint. At least by cloud-locker standards they didn’t. But I wanted more, a lot more. Here’s my quick take on what Apple launched and where I think they should go next: Automatic Downloads What is it? Enables iTunes buyers to transfer music [...]

How Mark Zuckerberg Hopes Music Will Prevent Facebook ‘Doing a MySpace’

Facebook is rumoured to be on the verge of integrating a number of music services including Spotify into its platform.  The ‘when will Facebook take on iTunes’ question is one which refuses to go away, but it’s the wrong question to ask.  Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want to take on iTunes, in fact he wants to [...]