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 have hit 200,000 subscribers on their Muve Music bundled subscription service that is available only on the Samsung Suede feature phone (Android smartphone version is coming).
Samsung might not be one of the big players in digital music but this mixed service portfolio approach indicates a strategic pragmatism that is crucial for anyone trying to compete with Digital Music’s Triple A of Apple, Android and Apple.
But the approach – and 7 Digital’s broader mobile success – is also indicative of an increasingly important strategic imperative for digital music services: namely navigating consumers multiple and interrelated device orbits (see figure).
Ubiquitous connectivity is, to put it mildly, some way off and the stream isn’t going to fully replace the download anytime soon. And yet, more people are using more devices to listen to music in more places than ever before, and these usage patterns are creating an increasingly complex mesh of usage orbits. Consumers are becoming more and more adept at developing specific and distinct use cases for their growing number of devices.
Historically, music allowed itself to be pulled across different devices, responding to consumer needs. This was a perfectly adequate first stage but now music services need to do more than just deliver music to where consumers are. To prosper in the next stage, music services need to tailor music experiences and value propositions both to specific use cases and be designed for co-existence within multiple, interrelated device orbits.
Coexistence Strategies
Of course some services will hope to simultaneously address every device use orbit (good luck on getting the licenses for that). But the smart services will design nuanced co-existence strategies that ensure the core use case not only fits alongside a consumer’s wider digital music activity but establishes itself as an indispensible complement to it. For example getting onto Sonos’ new Play:3 will likely be a more valuable route to the living room than trying to develop integrated hardware from scratch. Similarly delivering mobile Facebook playlist support and integrating discovery tools like the Hype Machine will prove every bit as important to the consumer experiences as securing the rights to deliver the music itself.
Consumers will continue to have more devices, more content and more music service choices. The challenge that music services and device manufacturers such as Samsung must meet is helping join those digital dots by navigating consumers’ device use orbits.
Music Industry Blog 