Mobile Music, Beyond the AppMobile Music, Beyond the App

Yesterday I delivered a keynote at the Music 4.5 Mobile music conference.  My presentation was entitled ‘Mobile Music: Apps, Ecosystems and the Cloud’ and here are some of the highlights. I’ve been a music industry analyst for more years than I care to remember and I recall my first mobile music experience being on 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 [...]

Why Spotify Needs an iPhone App to Get to Market

Spotify’s much anticipated iPhone app has been submitted to Apple for approval and certainly looks the part…in fact it almost looks too much the part.  This level of integration into the iPhone music playback experience may well be deemed by Apple to be too competitive to the core iPhone functionality. There is precedent, the Podcaster [...]

Unlimited Mobile Music Gains Momentum in Singapore

This weekend saw the launch in Singapore of SingTel’s unlimited music download service Amped in partnership with Universal Music.  The service is available with a SingTel data plan, so is very much a data revenue driver for the operator. Although a relatively small market, Singapore is fast becoming the global capital of unlimited mobile music [...]

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 [...]

The Ever Changing Face of Ovi: Why It Means So Much to Nokia

I spent the first half of this week in Barcelona at Nokia World.  I was fortunate enough to spend  time with many senior Nokia executives in small group sessions with my Forrester colleagues and also one-on-one sessions.  There were a lot of big announcements, not least of which was the superb looking N97.  But I’m going [...]

Music Mistakes, Myths and Misconceptions. Part 3: Subsidized

One again, continuing my bid to provide more fuel for the ‘music should be free’ fire this is the third in my short series of ‘Music Myths, Misconceptions and Mistakes’ posts, tackling one big ‘free’ issue at a time.  Today’s topic is Subsidized* (the previous two posts can be found here: Part 1: File Sharing  [...]