Why Facebook Can Be the Future of Social Music, But Isn’t Yet

Facebook recently secured licensing deals with music rightsholders in India, an important step in what has thus far been an underwhelming social music strategy since first inking rights deals in June 2018. Facebook has the potential to be a giant in social music, in no small part because most streaming music apps do such a poor job of social functionality themselves. Instead it is Asian streaming apps that are largely setting the pace, with the occasional western breakthrough (normally from Chinese companies). So, what does Facebook need to do to deliver on its undoubted promise? Look east…

Facebook has little motivation to become a streaming service in a traditional sense. There is little room for a new global scale player in the streaming space and the wafer-thin operating margins are not so much well understood as they are simply an open wound for the sector. Facebook’s move was always going to be one that focused on creating social experiences centred around connections and personal expression. It is a sound strategy, but one that has not yet been executed. However, it is not alone; indeed, the streaming music marketplace is woefully non-social.

Personal identity has always been at the heart of what music is. The music we listen to helps express who we are and, especially in formative years, helps shape who we are. In the analogue era, music fans could immediately convey who they were with shelves of vinyl or CDs. The very act of buying an album or single once showed that you had skin in the game for your favourite artists. Saying ‘I’ve got that album’ meant you cared enough about that artist to part with cash. In the streaming era, however, those shelves have been replaced by lists of files stored in the cloud, and ‘I’ve listened to that song’ has little inherent weight.

The self-expression void

This self-expression void needs filling, but in the west YouTube and, to a lesser degree, Soundcloud are really the only global scale streaming services meeting this need with features such as comments, thumbs up/down etc. In Asia though, things look very different. Tencent has built a portfolio of music apps that are either highly social (e.g. Kugou, Kuwo) or that are social expression first and music second (WeSing). Japan’s Line has followed a similar path.

Social music apps serve young audiences

In the west, social takes centre stage outside of streaming apps. A number of smaller apps such as Vertigo are emerging that focus on creating engaged micro communities around music. The standout success story is TikTok, which is run by Chinese company Bytedance. TikTok picks up where Musically left off (which of course was bought and then killed off by Bytedance). But, as exciting as Musically was and TikTok is for giving consumers a way to express themselves through music and dance, they appeal first and foremost to tweens and teens. TikTok is used by 31% of 16-19s, but just 2% of the overall adult population (interestingly, Musically had exactly the same penetration rates at its peak).

Facebook is not fulfilling its potential

All of which brings us onto Facebook. Facebook, through its portfolio of social apps, has an opportunity to deliver a portfolio of social music experiences that appeal to multiple age groups and use cases. This could be TikTok-like experiences for younger Instagram users, music greetings on Messenger, sound tracked stories on Facebook, or even delivering social layers directly into the streaming apps themselves. Of course, it is doing some of this already but to really deliver, Facebook needs to go beyond – far beyond. Social music experiences have not hit mainstream outside of Asia because the right formats aren’t there yet. Facebook has the potential to deliver but needs to innovate out of its comfort zone to do so.

Social music could be the next format

The decline of closed-format consumer electronics was the death knell for music formats – streaming is a business model rather than a format. But it is clear that the market needs something new. Streaming growth will slow and user experience innovation there has been limited. There is a risk that 2019 can look a lot like 1999, i.e. a long-established format going strong in a growing industry with the prospect of a fall around the corner seemingly ridiculous. Social formats may be the next much-needed injection of growth. If streaming monetizes consumption, social can monetize fandom. The question is whether Facebook can seize the mantle.

Facebook Aims To Bring The Fun Back Into Music

Facebook has announced its long mooted move into music. As widely anticipated the service offering focuses on using music to add context to social experiences. The official blog outlines two key use cases:

1. Adding music to videos
2. Doing live stream lip syncs in Facebook Live videos

For now the roll out is limited, which will give Facebook the opportunity to hone the service and learn from the behaviour of a relatively narrow user group. A wider roll out will follow.

It’s not about subscriptions, nor should it be

Facebook was never going to try be a Spotify clone. Let me rephrase that, just in case anyone in Facebook’s management team is getting tempted to – wrongly – make the wrong move – Facebook should never try be a Spotify clone. Not only is it the wrong fit, it simply doesn’t need to. Streaming music is a low margin business that is being competed over by a number of very well established heavyweights. Facebook may be embarking on a content strategy like the other tech majors, but unlike Apple and Amazon, its core focus will be ad supported, not premium. (MIDiA subscribers – check out our forthcoming inaugural ‘Tech Majors Quarterly Market Shares’ report to see how Facebook’s content strategy stacks up against Apple, Alphabet and Amazon, and where it will be heading.)

YouTube now has a social music competitor worthy of note

For a whole host of reasons which warrant a blog post of their own, streaming music has coalesced around a very functional value proposition. In short, the fun has been taken out of music. Apps like Dubsmash and Musical.ly showed that it doesn’t have to be that way. These apps were small enough to be able to do first and ask forgiveness later. Even though Facebook has all the ingredients to do what those guys did, but at scale, it is far too big to try to get away with that strategy so had to get licenses in place first. YouTube is the only other scale player that really brings a truly social element to streaming. Now it has got a serious challenger that just upped the ante beyond comments, mash ups and likes / dislikes. The music industry so needs this right now. Especially to win over Gen Z.

Is Facebook bottling it when it comes to messaging apps?

For the moment, Facebook’s strategy is squarely focussed around its core platform. There’s no mention of Instagram (surely the best outlet for this kind of functionality). This hints at a degree of strategic wobbles in Facebook towers. By going all in with its messaging app strategy Facebook took a brave move few big companies do: it decided to disrupt itself before someone else did. It realised that the future of social was in messaging apps not traditional social networks. It is now the world’s leading messaging app company, with only Chinese companies truly challenging it (South Koreas’ Kakao Corp, Japan’s Line and Chinese players excepted). But that shift of user time to under monetized ad platforms threatens Facebook’s ad revenue growth. Hence the focus of music to drive usage back to its core platform where it can generate more ad revenue.

Not a Musical.ly killer, at least not yet

Although some have been quick to liken Facebook’s lip sync functionality to Musical.ly and co, in reality it is not competing head on with those apps because it is initially launched as a Facebook Live feature. Betraying Facebook’s strategic imperative of building its Live business. Expect a true Musical.ly ‘killer’ sometime within the next nine months.

Facebook is not here to compete with Spotify, but it is here to compete with YouTube and Snapchat and to steal some of the clothes of Musical.ly and co. The currently announced features just scratch the surface of what Facebook can do. In many respects music has taken a series of retrograde steps socially speaking since the days of imeem, MySpace and Last.FM. Now Facebook has picked up the dropped baton and is running with it.

Finally for anyone at MIDEM, I will be there from Weds PM to Thursday evening, including doing a keynote Q+A with Napster’s new CEO early Thursday evening. Hope to see you there. My colleagues Zach Fuller and Georgia Meyer are there too, both are speaking, so be sure to say hi.

Facebook Has Got An Instagram Problem

Mark Zuckerberg dropped a bit of bombshell during the Q4 2017 earnings call. He announced that Facebook daily active users (DAUs) have fallen across some key markets, including the US. COO Sheryl Sandberg elaborated:

“In the US and Canada, these changes contributed to a DAU decline of 700,000 compared to Q3. We don’t see this as an ongoing trend, but we do anticipate that DAU in this region may fluctuate given the relatively high penetration level.”

Facebook attributed the fall to the newsfeed changes it has made to improve the quality of relevance of content users see, and to mitigate against trends such as fake news. While these will certainly have played a role, there is a bigger, more fundamental factor driving the decline: Facebook has an Instagram problem. Or, to be more precise, Facebook has a messaging app problem.

Messaging apps are the third phase of platforms on which digital audiences congregate. First came websites, then social networks and now messaging apps—which collectively accounted for 7.7 billion monthly active users (MAUs) at the end of 2017, up from 6.6 billion in 2016 and 5.5 billion in 2015. This is a massive segment that continues to grow at pace.

When the sector first started emerging, Facebook could have battened down the hatches and played a defensive hand. Instead, it did what the bravest companies do: it decided to disrupt itself before the competition did. The result: Facebook is now the global leader in the mobile messaging space, with a 2017 global market share of 49%, up from 43% in 2016 and 41% in 2015. It has done such a good job of transitioning its audience that 77% of Facebook’s total audience now use at least one messaging app. But, the problem with messaging apps is that no one has really worked out how to monetise them yet. And that’s a doubly big problem for Facebook because the more time that its users spend on lower monetised messaging apps, the lower the ad revenue yield. So, the more successful that Instagram and WhatsApp become (neither of which are included in Facebook’s active user numbers) the worse off Facebook itself becomes.

Hiking ad rates hides the impact

Right now, Facebook has got enough velocity in its core ad business to absorb the DAU drop. Q4 ad revenue grew by 26% on Q3, only one percentage point less growth than it recorded one year prior. But, until Facebook gets better at monetising its messaging apps, ad revenue will increasingly feel the pinch. This is why Facebook spent much of its earnings call talking about how it is increasing the relevance of advertising, improving targeting and improving user experience, so that it can charge advertisers more. For the midterm, it will hide the impact of the messaging app shift.

Longer-term though, Facebook needs a more robust solution. It cannot rush monetisation of its messaging apps as this will risk alienating users, especially in the more personal environments of WhatsApp and Messenger. Instagram will be the core focus of ad revenue growth, as this has already proven to be a natural home for branding. Facebook is also confident it will be able to build upon its initial base of business users of WhatsApp. All of this will take time though. So, it will need to be complemented with other efforts.

If it looks like a duck

Back in our November 2016 report ‘Facebook The Media Company: If It Looks Like A Duck’, we correctly predicted that Facebook would start to feel the impact of messaging app growth on its core platform. We also predicted that Facebook would start calling itself a media company, but that it would say it was a media company unlike any other. Sure enough, one month later that’s exactly what Zuckerberg did.

There is a serious point to this analyst gloating though; Facebook needs its media company strategy to start paying dividends. It is busy finalising music rights deals and is building up its video arsenal. For music, expect (ad supported) music-based social communication to find a home in messaging apps. For video, expect the messaging apps to start acting as virtual TV programming guides and remote controls for what will likely be a semi-scheduled ad supported and premium video offering. As we said in our 2016 report:

“Media companies beware, there’s a new player in town and it’s betting big, real big.”

This blog post is an excerpt from MIDiA’s forthcoming report ‘Facebook’s Instagram Problem: Building Media Strategy In A Fragmented Audience World’.

Zoe Keating’s Experience Shows Us Why YouTube’ Attitudes To Its Creators Must Change

It is easy to think of the internet as a mature medium, especially for those who were born into the internet era. However we are still at the earliest of stages. We are where radio was in the 1930’s and where TV was in the 1950’s: the first signs of the future markets are in place but the real maturation is yet to come. The greats of those early days, the Marconis and the RCAs, are now long gone but at the time they looked like they would rule forever. A similar long view should be taken to the internet. The dominant powers of the web (YouTube, Google search, Amazon, Facebook) may appear to have unassailable market leads but their time will come. Using more recent history, there was a time when AOL and MySpace looked irreplaceable. So why does all this matter to YouTube? The problem with absolute power is that it corrupts absolutely. YouTube, like those other dominant powers, has fallen victim to hubris. It is behaving like the unregulated de facto monopoly that it is. And in doing so it is taking its creators for granted. Right now that is bad for creators. Soon it may be bad for YouTube too. It Is Time For YouTube To Reassess It s Relationship With Content Creators Online video is truly coming of age. YouTube was one of the ice breakers and remains one the very biggest web destinations but the world is changing. YouTube has changed too of course, migrating skate boarding dogs, through music video to fostering a generation of YouTube stars like PewDiePie, Zoella and Smosh. But just as YouTube had to reinvent itself in the wake of the mid form revolution driven by Hulu et al so the time has come for another reinvention, but this one requires a change in business practices rather than product innovation. Most crucially YouTube needs to reassess its relationships with content creators and owners. When the first YouTube stars started to rise to prominence YouTube was almost positioned as a benefactor, giving the gift of a platform for these people to become stars. But now, a few years on, with millions of subscribers each, these stars are beginning to understand their real potential. In just the same way that a traditional TV star does not feel a debt of gratitude or a commitment to life long servitude to the TV channel that broke him or her, so YouTube stars are now beginning to reassess their options. The online video landscape though is dramatically less competitive than the TV landscape so options are limited. But where there is demand for change and no monopoly of supply of content, change will come. This is the context into which new video service Vessel has launched, offering YouTube stars cold hard cash payments and significantly bigger revenue shares, in return for giving just a few days of exclusivity. Be sure that few days window will change, but for now it is a low risk, high gain option for YouTube stars. Expect plenty more to follow Vessel’s lead. YouTube Is Abusing Its Position Of Absolute Power That should be where the story ends, well starts. But because the dominant internet companies are not subject to the same level of regulation as traditional companies they are able to abuse their power in order to try to maintain their strangle hold. YouTube found itself subject to extensive ire when it tried to foist a hugely restrictive contract on indie labels for its then forthcoming YouTube Music Key service. The indie sector was eventually able, via its licensing arm Merlin, to secure more favourable terms, but the same contract remains on the table for individual creators. Zoe Keating, an artist who sets the gold standard for DIY artists, has been a vocal advocate for YouTube channels as a revenue source. But now YouTube is trying to strong-arm her into signing what looks pretty much like that same original Music Key contract. Their demands include an effective Most Favoured Nation clause whereby anytime she uploads any music to the web she must upload it also to YouTube at exactly the same time. The contract also states a five year period and that failure to sign the contract will result in YouTube blocking both her channel and Keating’s ability (via Content ID) to get revenue from her own music uploaded without permission by others. The implications are:

• Music must always be available free on YouTube first on the web
• Artists must take a 5 year bet on streaming, even though there are massive doubts about its sustainability for artists

But it is the Content ID clause that is most nefarious. Content ID is not an added value service YouTube provides to content owners, it is the obligation of a responsible partner designed to help content creators protect their intellectual property. YouTube implemented Content ID in response to rights owners, labels in particular, who were unhappy about their content being uploaded by users without their permission. YouTube’s willingness to use Content ID as a contractual lever betrays a blatant disregard for copyright. Asymmetrical Conflict Zoe Keating is a rare talent and also a rare voice. She is willing to expose her entire digital music commercial life in a way very few artists are willing to. She is standing up to YouTube in a David and Goliath like manner but the deck is stacked against her because YouTube is able to abuse its de facto monopolistic position without any fear of regulatory intervention. If they get their way with independent music creators, expect them to take the exact same approach to other independent video creators in a bid to neuter the threat from disruptive new entrants like Vessel.  Rather than simply try to future proof itself against the emerging competition YouTube should focus on trying to be the best possible place for its creators to be to build prosperous careers. Instead it is trying to lock them in like prison inmates. Ultimately though this sort of action from YouTube reveals strategic hubris, arrogance and complacency. All of which are classic signs of an incumbent company teetering on the brink of disruption. As the Enron experience showed us, no company is too big to fail. And as my former colleague Michael Gartenberg used to say ‘cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people’.

And Then There Was the Facebook Play Button…

Last week we saw the launch of the Facebook Timeline for Artists and the Spotify Play Button, neither of which were without controversy (click on the links for more).  Now we have the two trends pulled together with the Facebook Listen Button.  The Facebook Listen Button gives artists a Listen button integrated into the front-end of their profile page which when clicked starts their music playing in the music app of the user.

The Good News: Elegant User Experience

• This is an elegantly simple integration, that is uncluttered and allows a user to achieve their goal quickly and simply
• It brings further consistency to Facebook artist pages, putting into practice the lessons learned from the anarchic chaos that was MySpace artist pages
• It will help drive usage of streaming music services

The Bad News: Problematic Integration

• The same player-integration issues apply to the Facebook Listen Button as do to the Spotify Play Button: a visitor has to a) be a user of one of the supported streaming music services and then b) has to have the app open.  Both of which are speed bumps in the user experience, especially if the visitor isn’t a user of a supported music service, perhaps because they live in a country where the services aren’t yet available
• Following being shunted off the artist profile front page by the Timeline, artist apps like BandPage, Reverb Nation and FanRX have effectively had their usability further downgraded by their play buttons being a couple of clicks away from the front page compared to the front page click of the Facebook Listen Button

Conclusion

Overall the Facebook user wins here.  The Listen Button is not intended as the consumption mode of choice for aficionado fans, it is a quick discovery tool for people new to the artist who want to learn more.  And with this key use case in mind, the design and implementation is clean, elegant and (reasonably) convenient.  But the flip side is that those artist apps find themselves further let down by the implementation.  Strategically this matters not so much for those apps (though of course to the companies themselves it will feel like a kick in the ribs while on the floor) but instead for what it says about Facebook’s ecosystem and platform aspirations.  Though these apps are a miniscule detail in Facebook’s Socially Integrated Web Strategy, developers will be looking at their experience and trying to learn whether this is a precedent for how Facebook treats its developer partners or just a blip.  Facebook needs to ensure that it is the latter and that this is known clearly and widely.

For now, Facebook has momentum to spare and developers will willingly swallow the risk for a stab at reaching the largest single digital audience on the global web.  But Facebook’s Socially Integrated Web Strategy depends upon those developers helping ensure that momentum is maintained.  Long term Facebook needs the developers as much as they need it.  Facebook may be the future for now  but that confidence could be beginning to beget hubris.  Remember, MySpace used to be the future too.

Facebook Timeline for Artists (When Platforms Forget Their Responsibilities)

Regular readers will know I’m a big advocate of content platforms and ecosystems.  Indeed device based ecosystems such as iTunes, Kindle and xBox are the success stories of paid content. More recently these platforms have been complemented by a new wave of ecosystems by the likes of Facebook and Spotify, that depend upon software and user data for walls instead of hardware.  Both sets of ecosystems depend upon 3^rd party developer and / publisher platforms for success.  A thriving platform is one which is defined as much by 3^rd parties as it is the host company.  But just as a blossoming garden requires careful tending so does an ecosystem.  The host has a responsibility to ensure that developers and publishers have the support, processes and transparency necessary to instill the confidence necessary for them to invest their time and resources into the platform.  It is a responsibility that does not always come cheaply to the hosts and isn’t always respected to the full, as we have seen with the impact of Facebook’s Timeline on a number of artist app developers.

Artist Timelines are Throttling Artist Apps

Facebook’s Timeline feature is looking like a great innovation from the social networking behemoth and there are many examples of artists, music services and music publications using the feature to great effect.  (Take a look at Spotify’s Facebook Timeline for a super cool implementation).  However the way in which Timeline was implemented on artist pages has had a dramatic cooling effect on what was beginning to shape up to be a vibrant community of Facebook artist app developers.  Latest data from AppData.com and reported on Digital Music News shows that Band Page (formerly Root Music), Reverb Nation and FanRX (formerly BandRX) all saw a steady decline in usage in the lead in to the Timeline switchover date and then a ‘falling off a cliff’ drop on the date itself.  All three apps have remained stuck at their decimated levels.

The key reason for the collapse in user numbers is that as part of the Timeline feature Facebook prevented these apps being able to act as the landing page for artist profiles.  There is very well thought out reasoning for this move: Facebook remembers only too well the anarchic chaos of MySpace artist pages, indeed the pared-down minimalism of Facebook’s UI was an intentional antidote to MySpace messiness.  But none of this detracts from the fact that Facebook has failed to fulfil its duties as platform host.  It should have done more to accommodate the concerns of artist app developers and would be well advised to work with them now to improve their lot.  Although it would be stretching credulity to claim these apps were responsible for artists switching from MySpace to Facebook, they certainly played an important role in easing the transition for many.

Being a Platform Means Looking Out for the Small Guys Too

If Facebook is serious about becoming a platform for music, it needs to ensure that it doesn’t just lay out the red carpet for Swedish streaming services.  The value of Facebook as a music platform will come from the functionality, utility and experience delivered by 3^rd party apps that help artists differentiate the way they engage with fans.  Apps such as Band Page, Reverb Nation, Fan RX and Bopler Games.  Ensuring that strategic priorities can be implemented without destroying the livelihoods of developers is a key responsibility of platform hosts.  Of course sometimes hosts patently ignore the responsibility and use app developers as free R&D – just think about the number of times Apple has killed off app companies by integrating their functionality directly into iOS.  But even Apple knows you can only do that so many times before you risk killing the proverbial golden goose.

I continue to maintain that Facebook’s platform strategy is subtly brilliant, and in the bigger scheme of things the artist app Timeline debacle is pretty small fry.  But if Facebook is to establish itself as a genuine music platform it must learn from the lessons Band Page et al are painfully teaching.

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.

Facebook Music: The Tale Of the 21st Century Portal and the Death of Music Service Brands

The digital world had been waiting with baited breath for Facebook’s Thursday announcements. Of course it was always going to be more than just music, but music nonetheless plays a key role in Facebook’s social-pivot.

Almost regardless of what they actually launched Facebook’s announcement was always going to be big news because Facebook is such a major player in the online world.  Facebook, along with Google, are – to use my sage former colleague David Card’s term – 21^st Century Portals.  The likes of AOL, MSN and Yahoo were transition technologies, that tried to translate the traditional media company model online.   Google and Facebook take a different approach, they are portals in a purer sense of the word.  They let you and others create the content, they provide instead the doorway to that content.  Google is the jumping off point for the places on the web that you don’t know yet, Facebook is the starting point for the places and people you do know (see figure 1).

Music: the great consumer lock-in

Why is this relevant to Facebook’s music strategy?  Because Facebook want to consolidate and extend their role in your digital life.  They want to give you more reasons not to leave Facebook.  Just as Apple and Amazon have each in their own ways used music as a consumer lock-in, so Facebook want to do the same.

The most significant music feature Facebook announced was the Music Timeline.  This timeline is a visual history of all the music you listen to in any of the music services that a) have integrated with Facebook and b) you have opted to feed that music service into your timeline.  Friends can listen to any of that music if they too use that service and have opted to have that service feed into their timeline.  As you can see it is currently a slightly clunky implementation of a great concept.  The next step Facebook need to take is a universal player.

By bringing together services like Spotify, Vevo and Turntable.FM and plugging them straight into the platform Facebook are transforming themselves into a content dashboard, an entertainment hub.  They are joining the digital dots in an increasingly fragmented and confusing digital music marketplace (see figure 2).

Music: the low hanging fruit

Of course Facebook are doing a lot more than just bringing music into the dashboard, but music is the mass market bait.  Music is the ubiquitous content that we all relate to and consume.  It was what Apple used to get started on the iTunes journey, it is what Amazon used to get started on the e-commerce journey and it is part of what Facebook are using to get started on the next stage of their journey as a 21^st Century Portal.  And if you can build a framework or eco-system around that consumption then the lowest common denominator becomes a mass market consumer lock-in tool.

Will Facebook turn music services into ‘dumb feeds’?

The integration of the 15 services announced (full list at the end of this post) is the result of 6 months of hard development but it is just phase 1.  Facebook is upping the ante as a platform for developers, so expect integration to go even deeper, even wider, really quickly.  This is all great news for digital music services: Facebook is so ubiquitous that is like the best ad campaign you could ever have, all your target customers are right there.

But there is also a big risk for music services. As they become more and more integrated in Facebook (especially when the universal player comes) their brands will increasingly fade, subsumed into Facebook.  One Twitterer yesterday posted: “what do you get when you combine Facebook with Spotify? Facebook”.  That encapsulates the dynamic perfectly.  Music services such as Spotify are certainly boosted by the endorsement of Facebook and are drawn like moths to a light bulb by the lure of Faceboook’s 800 million users, but just like the moths they may find their wings singed when they realise it isn’t the moon they’ve just reached.  Just as telcos nowadays fear becoming ‘dumb pipes’, music services will need to be careful not to become ‘dumb feeds’ into Facebook’s Music Timeline.

Facebook: Aggregator? Curator? Platform? Or Gatekeeper?

Facebook wants to lock users in but it also wants to lock content partners in.  It wants to ensure that Spotify, Vevo and the rest simply couldn’t imagine life without Facebook anymore, just in the way Google has embedded itself. With that power will come great responsibility and it is hoped Facebook will resist the temptation to become a gatekeeper.

Change, though never easy, is a big risk for Facebook

But it is not just the music services who face huge risk here, so does Facebook  itself. Mashable talked about  Facebook’s changes breathing life into a relationship with users that had gone stale.  This makes sense, but I suspect it is more a case of the partners in the relationship beginning to want different things. I think most mass market Facebook users were perfectly happy with the neutral platform for communicating and sharing experiences with friends.  Mass market Facebook users are the content wife, happy with how the relationship is going, ready to settle down further and have kids while Facebook is the husband with itchy feet wanting to travel the world and take up sky diving.

Online media (my blog included) are an echo chamber of a particular niche of the tech literate, that gives an distorted view of the world.  Sure I and you my readers may find the new Facebook changes exciting.  But I’d wager that at least 350 million of Facebook’s users are more likely to find them scary.  Facebook is so mainstream that it has to tread carefully.  (If you are in any doubt as to just how mainstream Facebook is Read It Write It Web write a story about Facebook’s universal log in that was bombarded with thousands of comments from irate Facebook users wanting to know where they could log into Facebook on the story because they clicked on the story link when Googling for ‘Facebook Log In’).

Execution is of course everything.  Sophisticated doesn’t need to mean complicated, it can be elegantly simple – just look at Spotify and Apple.   Facebook’s success will be in striking a balance in which they can grow momentum of use of new features but at the same time let the passive majority be as disengaged as they wish.

Facebook is already a 21^st Century portal, a social layer on our web activity, these new features give Facebook the capabilities to take this to the next level, to a point where social networking may even be a secondary reason for many people using Facebook.  Facebook as a social content hub first and a social network second.  Now that really would be a social-pivot.

 

The music services integrated at launch:

• AudioVroom
• Earbits
• Deezer
• iHeartRadio
• Jelli
• MixCloud
• MOG
• Rhapsody
• Rdio
• Slacker
• Songza
• SoundCloud
• Spotify
• TuneIn
• Turntable.fm