iTunes @ 10

On Sunday 28^th April Apple’s iTunes Store will celebrate its 10^th birthday.  It is arguably the single most important milestone in the digital music market to date.  In these days of cloud and streaming dominated industry discourse it easy to forget just how important Apple has been in the history of digital music and how equally important it remains today.  In 2012, iTunes generated approximately $3 billion in trade revenues for the recorded music industry, equivalent to around  55% of all digital trade income and close to a fifth of all global recorded music trade revenue.  By comparison Spotify was closer to 10% of digital trade revenues and 4% of all global trade revenue.  Spotify is clearly at a much earlier stage of growth and represents the future, but iTunes is far, far from being a historical footnote.

The Four Ages of iTunes

The history of iTunes falls into four key chapters:

• Baby Steps: On January 9^th 2001 Apple launched its iTunes music management software, and later that year in November came the first ever iPod.  Back then there was no iTunes Store and Apple made it very clear how they expected their customers to acquire digital music with their ad campaign slogan: ‘Rip Mix Burn’.  Revolutionary as it was though, the iPod got off to a modest start: despite multiple product updates, by the end of 2002 Apple had still only shifted 600,000 iPods. iTunes wasn’t changing the world, not yet.
• Changing the Tune: In April 2003 Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in the US, and then in 2004 in the UK, Germany, France and Canada, as well as an EU Store.  There were plenty of download stores already of course – Apple is always an early follower not a first mover – but they were crippled by restrictive DRM, cumbersome technology and lack of interoperability.  Most stores didn’t even allow buyers to transfer to MP3 players or burn to CD. And if you were lucky enough to be allowed to transfer to an MP3 player, your device probably didn’t even support the store’s DRM it probably also relied on incompatible 3^rd party music management software.  Apple changed all of that in an instant, delivering an end-to-end integrated experience.  Steve Jobs, through a combination of sheer force of personality and a commitment to spend big on marketing (really big) managed to persuade the big labels to support unlimited iPods, CD burning and multiple PCs.  Digital music hadn’t so much been stuck in the starting blocks as having its feet nailed to them.  Jobs set digital music free.  By July 2004 the iTunes Music Store had hit 100 million downloads, but more significantly by the end of 2005 Apple had sold 42.2 million iPods. iTunes was now selling iPods, and fast.
• Beyond Music: When Apple was in the business of selling monochrome screen iPods, music was the killer app and iTunes was the marketing tool. But that changed on June 29 2007 with the launch of the iPhone.  Apple soon needed more than music to market its multimedia, touch screen, accelerometer enabled devices. Movies were proving difficult to license and TV shows faced free competition from Hulu, iPlayer, ABC.com et al. The solution of course was the App Store.  The App Store took just 3 months to hit 100 million downloads – it had taken the iTunes Music Store 15 months to hit the same milestone.  Apple remained, and remains, firmly committed to music but its attention is inherently diluted by all of the other content types that iPhones and iPads cater for.  When Apple launches a new device it is EA Games you see demonstrating a new game to showcase the device’s capabilities, not a new music track.  (And of course the word ‘music’ got dropped from the iTunes Store name long ago.)
• The Platform Challenge: The App Store turned the iTunes Store into a platform, albeit it a highly controlled one.  This created an unprecedented window of opportunity for competing digital music services, suddenly they could break into the previously impenetrable iTunes ecosystem.  Pandora was an early mover and within a year of launching its iPhone app had acquired 6 million iPhone users, 60% of its then 10 million active users.  Shazam was another beneficiary, with the iPhone app finally giving Shazam relevancy and context it had long lacked.  And now of course we have Spotify, Deezer, Rhapsody, Rdio et al all hugely dependent on the iPhone, using it as the central reason subscribers pay 9.99.

Responding to Streaming

Many commentators suggest Apple is being left behind in the streaming era.  It echoes comments that Apple was getting left behind by the social age, and its responses then (Ping! and Genius) are not the most compelling of evidence for Apple jumping on the latest digital music bandwagon.  Apple will of course have to eventually move towards a more consumption and access based model but it will wait, as it always does, until streaming and is ready for primetime.  (A radio service is a logical interim step). Spotify’s 6 million paying subscribers are impressive but pale compared to Apple’s 450 million credit card linked iTunes account.  And besides, iTunes is enjoying its most successful period ever (see figure).  For all the need of interactive multimedia products to market iPhones and iPads, music remains one of the key use cases and the iTunes Store has seen an unprecedented surge in music downloads as millions of new music fans enter the iTunes ecosystem as iPad and iPhone buyers.

Interestingly Apple’s music download growth appears to be strongly outpacing the overall digital music market (see figure).  According to the IFPI total global digital trade revenue grew by 8% in 2012 but Apple’s iTunes downloads grew by about 50% during the same period, culminating in 25 billion cumulative downloads in Q4 2012.  Multiple factors are at play: iTunes has rolled out to new territories and a portion of the downloads will also be free.  Nonetheless, iTunes remains the beating heart of digital music.

The Next Chapter

Apple’s next big digital music move will have major strategic ramifications that will go far beyond the iTunes Store.  Currently Apple’s device pricing model is driven by storage capacity.  And of course in a streaming age consumers will store less and less content on their devices, so the ability to charge a premium for extra storage capacity will diminish.  This is a key reason why Apple has to go slow with the cloud.  Music however also presents an opportunity to safeguard price premiums.  Apple has shied away from subscriptions (Steve Jobs famously baited then-Rhapsody owner Rob Glaser that subscriptions were mere rentals) but device-bundled-subscriptions are now an opportunity that Apple simply has to take seriously.  Instead of charging a monthly fee for subscriptions Apple could create ‘iTunes-Unlimited’ editions’ of iPads and iPhones that would include ‘device lifetime’ access to either unlimited music streams or a monthly allowance of iTunes credits (for use on all forms of iTunes content).  The latter probably sits most comfortably with Apple as it presents the opportunity for tiers of access (e.g. $5 of monthly iTunes credit, $10 of monthly credit etc.) and so would enable Apple to support multiple product price tiers.

Whatever Apple decides to do with iTunes in the next 10 years, it will remain a key player and do not bet against it still being the preeminent force a decade from now.

Making an Impact: Assessing Streaming’s Role in the Digital Music Market

The streaming audio market is beginning to take the perturbingly familiar shape of the download market, with one big player stealing all of the momentum and scale.  And the debate about what streaming brings to the broader digital music market continues to divide the industry across ever deepening fault lines.

But leaving aside for a moment the much visited discussions about artist payments and financial viability of the freemium model, what impact is streaming having on the overall digital market?  To help answer that question I’ve compiled IFPI reported data for multiple international territories, including total market size and growth, digital market size and growth, physical share, download share and streaming share and mapped the relationships between them (see figure).

The results show that the streaming impact picture is a complex one with many permutations.  There isn’t a definitive trend that affects all markets in a consistent manner, however a few interesting trends do emerge:

• Streaming tends to get a foothold quicker in territories where the physical market is already in marked decline.  Once it gets established the physical market decline accelerates.  It is not possible yet to definitively conclude whether this is cause or effect.
• Strong streaming markets tend to experience significantly stronger digital growth rates than strong download markets.
• Strong physical markets are more likely to have downloads dominate their digital markets.
• Strong download markets tend to be more static.
• Unsurprisingly the Nordic markets (Spotify’s back yard) are the strongest streaming markets, France remains a mainly download digital market despite Deezer’s efforts, as does the UK.

So the impact of streaming is a nuanced story.  Over two years streaming certainly seems to have brought dynamic digital growth rates to a number of markets, and has accompanied, or driven, an accelerated CD decline.

The fact that downloads are stronger in CD markets is testament to the similarity of these ownership based models.  But perhaps the strong similarity is one of the reasons that downloads aren’t growing the digital market as strongly as streaming is in other markets? Of course downloading has already had years to get established and so there is an argument that it has already contributed its dynamic growth phase to digital.  This is probably true, but it shouldn’t be that way.  With the exception of the US, no major music market has yet passed the 50% digital mark, and across all markets, the majority of music buyers still buy CDs.  Which means that digital is still a long way from being in a position in which it could plausibly be called ‘mature’.

So digital growth does need to be happening at the rates we see in strong streaming markets, and not in strong download markets.  And if streaming is the only tool with which those rates can be achieved then the questions around commercial sustainability (for the services and across the entire music industry value chain) become all the more pressing.

The YouTube Dilemma

Back in January 2011 in my Midem address I posited that YouTube was digital music’s  Killer App with about 25% monthly user penetration across all European adults in 2010, up a few percent from 2009.  I also explained that penetration for the under 25s was about double that.  The most important point though wasn’t the scale of adoption, but adoption relative to other digital music activities: the next most popular digital music activity was P-to-P (with about half the adoption rate of YouTube) and paid downloads were fourth with a paltry 11%.  The key takeaway was that YouTube is succeeding with digital music adoption where other services were not, that YouTube had got something right from a user experience perspective that others hadn’t, and that the industry should do a better job of understanding YouTube’s popularity.

19 months on and the latest Nielsen stats reveal it is still the same story.  In some quarters it’s being viewed as a dramatic sea change in the balance of digital power. It isn’t of course, instead it is the successful consolidation of a market leading position by YouTube.   Some of this has happened organically but much is down to sheer hard work by YouTube.

Plan V

Since my 2011 Midem speech, YouTube have upped their game strategically, adding functionality and investing heavily in content channels.  They’ve done so largely because of the V word…Vevo.  Vevo may have its challenges but strategically it was a master stroke by Universal Music: start pull the best music video out of YouTube, put it into an interface that is so deeply integrated into YouTube that it just feels like another YouTube channel to users, and all the while have YouTube deliver the audience. Unsurprisingly YouTube got nervous, particularly when Vevo started ruminating on taking the service out of YouTube entirely and into Facebook.

YouTube is No MySpace

Music matters massively to YouTube: they kick started the online video revolution with short-form video clips, but the momentum firmly shifted to mid-form video providers like Hulu and iPlayer.  If you scraped music video away YouTube was left with skateboarding dogs and ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’.  Hence YouTube’s investment in features like playlist functionality and $200 million in original content channels.  Back when MySpace was beginning to lose ground to Facebook I suggested that MySpace should stop pretending it was a social network anymore and start focusing instead on being a platform for bands and their fans.  They didn’t and they ended up losing out on both counts.  YouTube, to their credit, have recognized what their strengths are and are playing to them.

Why YouTube is Still Music’s Killer Digital App

YouTube is still digital music’s killer app because:

• It’s free. Of course so are Spotify and Pandora et al but YouTube is free and fully on-demand everywhere.  If you want Spotify on your iPhone you have to pay £/$/€9.99 to do so, but you can listen to unlimited on demand YouTube music for free on the iPhone, it’s even integrated into iOS (for now at least).  In fact nearly two thirds of iPhone users use the iOS YouTube app.
• It has all the catalogue in the world, and more. Because of the way YouTube entered music content licensing through the back door in the days before its acquisition by Google by selling stakes to the major labels, YouTube has ended up with effectively being given clearance for much much more content than every other licensed music service.  Granted YouTube have since implemented a largely effective takedown process, but the fact that YouTube’s catalogue is music uploaded by users means it doesn’t have the same restrictions other services do, such as territory restrictions, music not yet being officially available digitally etc.  If there’s a piece of music in the world then the odds are it is on YouTube.  Which cannot yet be said of other music services.
• It just works.  YouTube is available wherever you are in the world (in the main), on whatever device you own, and you don’t have to register or sign up.  It also has effective discovery tools such as user votes, comments and collaborative filtering, and features like playlists.
• You can download to keep too.  Streaming ripping might not be part of the official YouTube featureset, and recent action has been taken to block one such service, but there are dozens of stream ripping apps out there and they are actively used by a meaningful share of regular YouTube users.
• It’s an audio visual experience. And of course, YouTube is so much more than music.  It’s an interactive, social, audio visual experience designed for the digital age.  Whilst most other licensed music services have little or no video.

It would be pretty hard to compete against that combination of features if it had a 9.99 price tag on it, let alone when all of that is available for free, to all consumers in virtually every territory in the globe. Which brings us to the YouTube dilemma.

The YouTube Dilemma

YouTube is simultaneously the most important licensed digital music service on the planet and one of the biggest challenges to all the other licensed music services.  It used to be that YouTube was clearly a discovery mechanism, and indeed it still is, but it is now also firmly a consumption vehicle.  YouTube has become both the journey and the destination rolled into one.

Of course there are plenty of music fans who use YouTube as a complement to buying music or subscribing and as a means of finding and sampling new artists. But plenty more use it instead of those other options, particularly those young Digital Natives who value free, convenience and ubiquity over audio quality.

So the music industry has a difficult balance to maintain, between ensuring the most valuable digital discovery asset it has its disposal remains vibrant, but at the same time ensuring it doesn’t hinder the opportunity for services which generate much higher revenue per user.

YouTube and parent Google can do a lot to help.  They can accelerate their focus on making YouTube’s content unique with further investment in live concerts, exclusive sessions etc.  More importantly they can more deeply integrate with paid music services.  (And if integrating deeply with Apple and Spotify might be a step too far then this should be the development path for Google’s music strategy.)

Meanwhile the music industry can help redress the balance too.  YouTube has defined what the mass market digital consumer expects a music service to look and feel like: namely it needs to have video, work seamlessly on all devices (not just 1 extra device at a time), and have social features.  YouTube has set the blueprint for the next generation music product, the industry now needs to pick up the baton and transform that prototype into a high quality, premium product.

Streaming Goes Global: Analysing Global Streaming Music With EMI Insight Data

This July EMI’s Insight division launched an unprecedented initiative to share data from their 850,000 interview Global Consumer Insight data.  This dataset covers 25 countries and over 7,400 artists, with twelve people being interviewed at any given moment, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The data is being shared with the data science community in a range of initiatives including  forthcoming Music Data Science Hackcamps.
As hard data continues to be something of a scarce commodity for the streaming music debate I decided to mine EMI’s dataset to create a snapshot of global streaming music adoption, and its influence on the broader music market. I have written up a report which you can download for free here.  Additionally EMI have given me permission to post the data here so that you can play around the data yourselves.  In fact I invite you to go and play around with the data and see if you can find any trends that I missed in my analysis.

Here are some of the key findings from the report (which of course, along with all of the opinions and interpretations are my own and are not, necessarily, EMI’s)

• Streaming has a firm foothold. 32% of consumers across the globe are now using streaming services (see figure 1).  However, adoption is far from uniform.
• Nordics lead the way. Norway and Sweden (the home of Spotify) are respectively the 1^st and 3^rd most active streaming markets globally.  Key to this trend is the relative sophistication of Internet users in these markets.  48% of Norwegians are now streaming music users, as are 43% of Swedes.
• Streaming is a good fit for piracy riddled Spain.  Spain is the 2^nd most active market with 44% streaming penetration.  But whereas consumer sophistication was key to Nordic adoption, in Spain piracy and the legacy of free were the most important drivers.
• Free is a good fit for France too. The role of piracy and free have also been important in France.  French authorities have pushed through the controversial Hadopi legislation but the carrot of Spotify and local streaming success Deezer has delivered immediate results.  Translating streaming usage into purchases though is less successful: just 13%.
• Purchase conversion rates are higher in lower penetration markets. The US, Canada, UK, Germany and Denmark have lower streaming penetration but these markets have much higher streaming-to-paid downloads conversion rates, averaging 23% of streaming users.
• Streaming Drives Music Discovery and Consumption. Although it is still too early to draw definitive conclusions about exactly how much streaming impacts piracy and sales, the case for driving discovery and consumption is much clearer.  55% of global streaming music users state that they now discover new artists and new music as a result of streaming.
• Usage is steady among existing users. Usage among existing streaming users is broadly steady with 19% using streaming more than 12 months previously and 20% more.

Download the complete report here.

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.

The Digital Music Year That Was: 2011 in Review and 2012 Predictions

Following the disappointment of 2010, 2011 was always going to need to pack more punch.  In some ways it did, and other ways it continued to underwhelm. On balance though the stage is set for an exciting 2012.

There were certainly lots of twists and turns in 2011, including: disquiet among the artist community regarding digital pay-outs, the passing of Steve Jobs, Nokia’s return to digital music,  EMI’s API play, and of course Universal Music’s acquisition of EMI.  Here are some of the 2011 developments that have most far reaching implications:

• The year of the ecosystems. With the launch of Facebook’s content dashboard, Android Music, the Amazon Fire (a name not designed to win over eco-warriors),  Apple’s iTunes Match and Spotify’s developer platform there was a surge in the number of competing ecosystem plays in the digital music arena.  Despite the risk of consumer confusion, some of these are exciting foundations for a new generation of music experiences.
• Cash for cache.  The ownership versus access debate raged fully in 2011, spurred by the rise of streaming services.  Although we are in an unprecedented period of transition, ownership and access will coexist for many years yet, and tactics such as charging users for cached-streams blur the lines between streams and downloads, and in turn between rental and ownership. (The analogy becomes less like renting a movie and more like renting a flat.)
• Subscriptions finally hit momentum.  Though the likes of rdio and MOG haven’t yet generated big user numbers Spotify certainly has, and Rhapsody’s acquisition of Napster saw the two grandaddys of the space consolidate.  Spotify hit 2.5 million paying users, Rhapsody 800,000 and Sony Music Unlimited 800,000.
• New services started coming to market.  After a year or so of relative inactivity in the digital music service space, 2011 saw the arrival of a raft of new players including Blackberry’s BBM Music, Android Music, Muve Music , and Rara.  The momentum looks set to continue in 2012 with further new entrants such as Beyond Oblivion and psonar.
• Total revenues still shrank.  By the end of 2011 the European and North American music markets will have shrunk by 7.8% to $13.5bn, with digital growing by 8% to reach $5 billion.  The mirror image growth rates illustrate the persistent problem of CD sales tanking too quickly to allow digital to pick up the slack.  Things will get a little better in 2012, with the total market contracting by just 4% and digital growing by 7% to hit $5.4 billion, and 41% of total revenues.

Now let’s take a look at what 2011 was like for three of digital music’s key players (Facebook, Spotify and Pandora) and what 2012 holds for them:

Facebook
2011.  Arguably the biggest winner in digital music in 2011, Facebook played a strategic masterstroke with the launch of its Digital Content Dashboard at the f8 conference.  Subtly brilliant, Facebook’s music strategy is underestimated at the observer’s peril.  Without investing a cent in music licenses, Facebook has put itself at the heart of access-based digital music experiences.   It even persuaded Spotify – the current darling of the music industry – to give it control of the login credentials of Spotify’s entire user base. Facebook’s Socially Integrated Web Strategy places Facebook at the heart of our digital lives.  And it’s not just Facebook that is benefiting: Spotify attributed much of its 500,00 new paying subs gained in October and November to the Facebook partnership.

2012. Facebook is quietly collecting unprecedentedly deep user data from the world’s leading streaming music services.  By mid-2012 Facebook should be in a position to take this to the record labels (along with artist profile page data) in the form of a series of product propositions.  Expect whatever is agreed upon to blend artist level content with music service content to create a 360 user experience.  But crucially one that does not require Facebook to pay a penny to the labels.

VERDICT: The sleeping giant of digital music finally stepped up to the plate in 2011 and will spend 2012 consolidating its new role as one of the (perhaps even *the*) most important conduit(s) in digital music history.

Spotify.
2011.  It would be puerile not to give Spotify credit for a fantastic year.  Doubts about the economics of the service and long term viability remain, but nonetheless 2011 was a great year for the Swedish streaming service.  It finally got its long-fought-for US launch and also became Facebook’s VIP music service partner. Spotify started the year with 840,000 paying subscribers and hit 2.5 million in November.  It should finish the year with around 200,000 more.  Its total active user base is now at 10 million. But perhaps the most significant development was Spotify’s Developer platform announcement,paving the way for the creation of a music experience ecosystem.  Spotify took an invaluable step towards making Music the API.

2012: Expect Spotify’s growth trajectory to remain strong in 2012.  It should break the 3 million pay subscribers mark in February and should finish the year with close to 5 million.  And it will need those numbers because the funnel of free users will grow even more dramatically, spurred by the Facebook integration.  But again it will be the developer platform that will be of greatest and most disruptive significance.  By the end of 2012 Spotify will have a catalogue of music apps that will only be rivalled by Apple’s App Store.  But even Apple won’t be able to come close to the number of Apps with unlimited music at their core.  More and more start ups will find themselves opting to develop within Spotify rather than getting bogged down with record label license negotiations.  Some will find the platform a natural extension of their strategy (e.g. Share My Playlists) but others will feel competitive threat (e.g. Turntable FM).  If Spotify can harness its current buzz and momentum to create the irresistible force of critical mass within the developer community, it will create a virtuous circle of momentum with Apps driving user uptake and vice versa.  And with such a great catalogue of Apps, who would bet against Spotify opening an App Store in 2012?

VERDICT: Not yet the coming of age year, but 2011 was nonetheless a pivotal year paving the way for potentially making 2012 the year in which Spotify lays the foundations for long term sustainability.

Pandora
2011.  Though 2011 wasn’t quite the coming of age year for Spotify it most certainly was for Pandora.  In June Pandora’s IPO saw 1^st day trading trends reminiscent of the dot.com boom years.    By July it had added more than 20 million registered users since the start of the year to hit 100 million in total and an active user base of 36 million, representing 3.6% of entire US radio listening hours.  But Pandora also felt the downs of being a publically listed company, with flippant traders demonstrating their fear that Spotify’s US launch would hurt Pandora.

2012: And those investors do have something of a point:  whatever founder Tim Westergren may say, Spotify will hurt Pandora.  A portion of Pandora’s users used Pandora because it was the best available (legal) free music service.  Those users will jump ship to Spotify.  This will mean that Pandora’s total registered user number will not get too much bigger than 100 million in 2012 and the active number will likely decline by mid-year.  After that though, expect things to pick up for Pandora and active user numbers to grow again.  The long term outlook is very strong.  Pandora is the future of radio.  It, and services like it, will get an increasingly large share of radio listening hours with every month that passes in 2012, and with it a bigger share of radio ad revenues.  Pandora will be better off without the Spotify-converts, leaving it with its core user base of true radio fans. Spotify’s new radio play will obviously be a concern for Pandora  but this is Pandora’s core competency, and only a side show for Spotify.  Expect Pandora to up their game.

VERDICT: Since launching in November 2005 Pandora have fought a long, dogged battle to establish themselves as part of the music establishment, and 2011 was finally the year they achieved that.  There will be choppy waters in 2012 but Pandora will come out of it stronger than it went in.

Just How Important Do You Think iTunes Actually Is?….

I’ll let the chart do most of the talking.

The key takeaway  is that two of the oldest models in the digital marketplace (radio and retail) dominate in terms of users.  Persistence certainly pays off for Pandora and Apple.

The iTunes Store is of course more important than Pandora for music industry revenue as its core function is to sell music.  More than eight years after launch the iTunes Store remains by far the biggest success story in digital music sales, which given Apple’s relative lack of interest in innovating iTunes compared to their hardware, says as much about the competition as it does Apple.

There used to be a line of argument that Apple was a unique case because in its base of iPod owners it had converted the majority of the engaged, tech-savvy music aficionados that there were to be had.  That Apple had already grabbed the addressable market for competitor services.   Prior to the launch of the iPhone that base represented 88 million iPods sold.  Since then though Apple has sold 0.4 billion more devices.  The old argument just doesn’t hold water.  Apple is doing something right – or rather many things right – that can turn (relatively) mass market consumers into savvy and engaged consumers.  Something that the competition is patently not managing to do when it comes to digital music.  And as much as it may be that Apple’s largely closed ecosystem is core to converting this behaviour into paid content behaviour, it is clear that the rest of the competitive marketplace needs to start learning how to better compete with Apple if the balance of power is ever to be altered.

Some methodological notes:

• YouTube is not included because although it is by far the largest online music destination it is not a pure music service.
• There is a mixture of paid and total users numbers in here.  This chart is intended to give a sense of relative scale of service adoption across a diverse range of user experiences and business models.
• The list is illustrative, not exhaustive.  So there are major players such as Amazon, MelOn and smaller players like Sony Music Unlimited, rDio, MOG, 7 Digital, MusicLoad, We7 etc who are not on here.
• The estimate for Apple’s total regular music buyers is based upon an assumption of 40% of the unique owner installed base of iPods, iPhones and iPads.  That is to say that installed base numbers have been created for each device using replacement and new sales assumptions, and that then a unique installed base number was created using assumptions about multiple device ownership etc.  The assumptions were cross referenced and checked in multiple ways including calculating the average number of downloads per buyer, cross referencing against total market level statistics for buyer penetration and digital download sales.  The number is an informed directional estimate not a definitive measure.

Waiting For Facebook

As the market collectively holds its breath in anticipation of Facebook’s much (over?) hyped music service launch this coming Thursday, it is instructive to take stock of where we are at the moment to better understand the eager expectation.

Digital music is stuck in a rut

At the start of the year I made a speech at Midem, positing that digital music was at an impasse.  Now, with the best part of a year gone, it still is. Granted we’ve had some important and encouraging developments (Spotify’s US launch and 1 million+ paying subs and Pandora’s IPO among them) but the fundamentals remain unchanged (see figure):

 

• Paid downloads are an Apple micro-economy not a marketplace. Despite valiant efforts from the likes of 7 Digital and Amazon, the 99 cent download just isn’t translating well outside of the iTunes ecosystem.  Why?  Because the tail is wagging the dog.  iTunes downloads are an extension of i-devices not vice versa.   The iTunes 99 cent download is effectively monetized CRM.  Deep, elegant device integration is crucial for any digital music experience, especially so paid downloads. 7 Digital’s Music Hub build for Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is the sort of implementation needed, but both 7 Digital and the market as a whole need a much wider addressable base than Galaxies alone (retail embargoes notwithstanding).
• Premium rentals are an evolutionary dead-end. Despite Spotify doing a most admirable job of breaking the 1 million premium subscribers mark – which all other services had spent years failing to do – the fact remains that 9.99 rented music is a high-end aficionado market.  Spotify have done a great job of building on the fantastic pioneering work of Rhapsody but in doing so they have developed the ‘faster horse’ that Henry Ford said his customers would have requested instead of the Model T if he’d asked them what they wanted.  Rdio and Mog both have great user experiences but have struggled to make headway because the basic value proposition of 9.99 a month for rented music just doesn’t appeal to most consumers.  Heck, 9.99 a month for owned music doesn’t even appeal anymore to most consumers anymore.  Mass market consumers may be willing to pay much more than 9.99 a month on TV, broadband, mobile etc. but they won’t for music. It may not be pretty but this is the harsh reality that must be accepted. As far as music is concerned the contagion of free is legion and the best way to fight free is with free itself (or at least something that feels like free – see my previous post on subsidized subscriptions for more).
• Digital music is cluttered and complex. There is so much choice of catalogue and services that paradoxically there is no choice at all for consumers, unless you’re a savvy aficionado willing to wade your way through the clutter. Mass market consumers need the digital dots joining.  Back in my days at Forrester I wrote about the need for 360 Degree Music Experiences, where the disparate parts of the digital music journey get pulled together by an interconnected ecosystem.  The case for this is even stronger now.

Music: Facebook’s user lock-in

And this is where Facebook comes in.   As I wrote earlier this year, it doesn’t make any sense for Facebook to try to ‘do a MySpace’ or for that matter to ‘do a Spotify’ or ‘do an iTunes’.  Facebook is becoming a launch pad for our online lives just as Google is.   But whereas Google largely gets us to places we don’t yet know, Facebook is what (and who) we do know.  And in that lies a massive asset for digital music and an even larger platform for Facebook’s future growth.

I expect Facebook to join music’s digital dots and become a social dashboard for digital music activity.  By plugging our music activity into our social graph Facebook can both enrich those services and tap into the tastes of our friends.  The net result will be a richer digital music experience across multiple services and – most crucially for Mark Zuckerberg – one more reason why we’ll want to stick with Facebook when the Facebook-Killer finally raises its long overdue head.

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 truly transformational change within the music industry.  The fact that this panel focuses on both retailing and licensing is emblematic of the convergence, nay collision, of product models and business models.  Collisions that help explain the current turmoil the music industry faces and in which the foundations for future growth lie.

So what exactly has gone wrong?

Firstly, digital retailing is looking increasingly unfit for purpose. It has failed in its key objectives, included in which is a failure to generate a format succession cycle.  With the cases of the cassette and the CD, these formats were firmly in the ascendency by the time their predecessors were in terminal decline, and they then went on to drive periods of unprecedented prosperity.   The same though patently does not apply to the paid download.  However if you swapped out paid downloads for MP3s then the line would be off the chart.  Consumer demand is not the problem.  Current digital retailing formats failing to meet consumer demand is.  And of course Apple’s closed iTunes ecosystem plays a massive role here too.

And if you look at the licensing side of the equation we have problems there too.  Rights owners and artists both feel they don’t get enough from Freemium cloud services, and yet the services themselves feel that they pay too much to those very same parties to be financially sustainable.  With cracks appearing right across the value chain it is looking increasingly like there are too few levers left to pull to fix the model.

Now as concerning as all this may be it doesn’t mean the end of the music industry, nothing like that in fact.  Instead it is simply the end of the beginning: the end of the first chapter in the digital music business.

What we have now are transition products that did a great job of starting us on the path out of the analogue era but their usefulness is drawing to a close.  The paid download is a sustaining innovation.  For those of you not familiar with Clayton Christensen’s ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ this refers to the principle that companies essentially have two ways to innovate their products.  The first is that they can play the safe game where they tweak features and pricing to defend market share and revenue growth.  These are sustaining innovations.  Or they can take a gamble with disruptive innovations that have huge potential but also massive risk and can even shatter their existing business models.

Unsurprisingly most incumbent companies opt for the safe bet.  But the safe bet is often anything but safe, as it leaves an innovation vacuum which is swiftly filled by the competition, or in the case of music, by the illegal sector.  File sharing was the disruptive and transformational innovation of digital music, not the paid download. Added to this, innovation has been too heavily focused on business models and not enough on user experience. Now the music industry needs to create its own transformational innovation, putting user experience to the fore, before the informal sector does so….again.

So how do we get out of this situation?

Here’s my uber edited solution: two segments and three monetization models.  Forget for a moment the complex multi variant segmentation schemes you’ve painstakingly constructed. Think instead of consumers as those who will pay and those who won’t.  On the free side we have those consumers who are falling out of the habit of buying CDs and either haven’t discovered digital alternatives yet, or if they have they are perfectly happy with free services such as Pandora, Spotify, We7 and of course their killer app: YouTube.  Here also are all those pesky freeloading pirates – they’re not lost customers, but they’re probably not about to start paying 9.99 a month for Spotify Premium either.  And on the other side we have the highly engaged music aficionados.  This used to just be the ‘50 quid bloke‘ but sites like Pledge Music are creating a new generation of younger music fans who will pay good money for recorded music when they establish a direct relationship with artists.

The way to monetize these three groups is threefold: at the bottom of the hierarchy are ad supported free services for the passive majority and the freeloaders, where the contagion of free is legion; at the top there are premium services for the much smaller numbers of engaged aficionados (but they need an entire new generation of music products that are interactive, social and connected, a true successor to the CD – if all they have to chose from is 9.99 a month streaming rentals then this segment will dwindle to the few percentage points of consumers who actually pay those services); and in the middle we have the best balance of scale and ARPU, with subsidized services where third parties such as telcos and car manufacturers pick up some or all of the wholesale cost to make music feel-like-free or close-to-free for end users.  This is the monetization model which will pull in many of those who won’t pay and also those who are in danger of falling out of the habit of paying.

So there you have it: 2 segments + 3 monetization models = the foundation for a prosperous music industry in 2012 and beyond.

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 of it:  the US digital music market has a lot at risk in the face of Spotify’s arrrival and of course there are growing doubts about the Freemium model.

The label negotiations resulted in the last year in  limits being put on the free element of Spotify so that the full unlimited free offering that got Spotify off to such a great start in Europe will only be available to an initial swathe of invited users in the US.  Once the invite-user phase is over, free users will get 20 hours a month for 6 months, falling to 10 hours thereafter, along with a 5 plays-per-track limit.

When Unlimited Isn’t Actually Unlimited

The 10 hours / 5 plays mix is clearly intended to make people use Spotify as a complement to other services, not as a replacement.  Many listeners simply won’t bump into those restrictions.  Those that do though will be the more engaged music aficionados who will either have the will and means to pay for the unlimited premium offering, or will be young kids and those who can’t pay 9.99 a month and they will look elsewhere i.e. to YouTube and to illegal alternatives.

There is evidence to suggest that both might have happened in Europe: in March Spotify announced it had 1 million paying subscribers (something that no other premium services has yet achieved).  But they also announced that only 6.7 million of their total 10 million subscribers are active.  So a third of Spotify’s users either a) just got tired of the novelty of the service b) don’t use it much c) got fed up of the new restrictions and voted with their feet.  The likelihood is all three play a role.

This all matters because ‘just how free’ Spotify actually is will play a major role in deciding how similar an impact it will have in the US compared to Europe.

Spotify Will Be Net-Positive for the US Digital Music Market

My take is that Spotify will be successful and will also be disruptive but on balance will be net positive for the US digital music market (see figure).

Spotify has that priceless commodity: momentum.  More than that, they have mastered the art of maintaining momentum.  Most other services would have seen their momentum fizzle out in the face of a yearlong delay to a US launch.  Not Spotify. Instead they actually managed to use it to sustain momentum.  How?  Because of another of Spotify’s core strengths: scarcity.  Nothing drives demand like scarcity of supply.  Spotify built its European growth upon a perception of scarcity through its invite-only launch. It is set to do the same in the US, but with additional boon of massive pent up demand from US digital music fans who have had to deal with absolute scarcity this last year.

Can Spotify Afford to Be Successful in the US?

Until Spotify ramps up its US ad sales business every free user will be proportionately more costly than free European users.  But Spotify has learned a lot from its European experience.  It has learned which levers to pull to manage growth.  I expect Spotify to plan and manage US growth on a ratio-target basis, with free users never being allowed to exceed a certain share of total users.  E.g. the 50 million users target touted by an over-zealous Spotify ad sales exec would require 5 million paying subscribers to have signed up.  Spotify can’t afford to screw this up.  Getting the economics right will be crucial to a successful exit, which has surely got to be the next move.

What Do US Music Services Have to Lose?

If Spotify can be successful, to what extent will their gains come at the expense of the incumbent services?

• Rhapsody, Napster, MOG, Rdio et al: the incumbent premium subscription services are right to be nervous: some of them have had years to make the model work yet haven’t managed to reach the 1 million subscriber mark.  Rhapsody has announced that it just hit 800,000 paying subscribers, but despite being 150,000 up from the last tally it is only 25,000 more than Q4 2008 which equates to a net gain of just 833 new subscribers a month. Rhapsody’s position is reflective of the overall stagnant nature of the premium subscription sector in the US.  Prior to Spotify the European subscription market didn’t even get out of the starting blocks, let alone have the chance to become stagnant.  So the US subscription services have good reason to fear Spotify as a premium player.  With the restrictions on free plays I don’t anticipate them losing many subscribers to Spotify Free though.
• Pandora: whatever Pandora’s Tim Westergren says, Pandora will see some of its users defect to Spotify.  Yes it is a different value proposition and yes there are many users for whom Spotify will be no alternative.  But there will be those who simply tolerate not being able to listen to exactly what they want rather than perceiving it as part of the value proposition.  Those users, for whom free is the key driver, will be at risk.  Once again though, the limits on Spotify’s free tier should contain this threat to some degree.
• Apple, Amazon and Goole: none of the big three really have much to fear given their different positioning and products but will watch for new Spotify product features cautiously.  They may even feel the need to accelerate launch of free on-demand streaming in their locker services (i.e. not just of users’ existing music collections)

So it becomes clear that the record labels have a done a decent job of engineering Spotify’s licenses in such a way that the incumbent US services face minimum competitive risk.   One hopes that this doesn’t also mean that Spotify’s wings have been clipped so far that it won’t be able to truly shine in the US.  Because Spotify has done a huge amount in Europe: bringing digital music to the mainstream and freeing it from the chains of the iPod.

I actually hope that Pandora and Rhapsody et al do feel some serious competitive pressure, so that they can focus on what they need to do better and then lean on the labels to give them the licenses to do so.  Because the best way the labels can drive the market is by using licensing to empower services with more functionality rather than using it to restrict disruptive threats.