Quick Take: A Big Deal Benefits Both Sprint And Tidal

News just emerged that SoftBank owned Sprint has acquired a 30% stake in Tidal, reportedly for $200 million against a valuation of $600 million. The valuation seems on the high side, but a big ticket investment works well for both parties.

According to MIDiA’s latest survey data from December 2016, just 2.7% of consumers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada use Tidal weekly (and that’s probably over reporting). Subscriber wise Tidal had 1 million subscribers at the end of 2016, just 1% of the global subscription market. (Although Tidal has published numbers suggesting it is closer to 4 million, those numbers are not commercially active subscribers but instead ‘users’ and trialists). Tidal is a small player in the global streaming subscription market. So why would Sprint / SoftBank a) want to invest in a small player and b) pay so much?

Making A Small Partnership Bigger

As we discussed in our December MIDiA Research report Next Steps For Telco Music: The Revenue Or User Dilemma telco music bundles are at a turning point. Telco music bundles were highly important in the early stages of streaming subscriptions, helping kick start the market. But their share of total music subscribers has fallen from a high of 32% in 2013 to just 14% in 2016. The original thinking behind telco bundles was differentiation, but when every telco has got a music bundle there’s no differentiation anymore. Additionally, if you are a top tier telco and you haven’t got Apple or Spotify, then partnering with one of the rest risks brand damage by appearing to be stuck with an also-ran. By making a high profile investment in Tidal, Sprint has thus transformed its forthcoming bundle from this scenario into something it can build real differentiation around. Also Tidal has built its proposition around exclusivity and that is being put front and centre of this partnership.

Buy Big To Look Big

Meanwhile, SoftBank has the benefit of a high priced acquisition. Such deals are typically viewed more favourably by investors than smaller ones as it is a statement of intent. Often companies can quickly make their investment back in increased market capitalization because of an uplift to the share price. This is the strategy that kept Yahoo afloat for the last 15 years.

Tidal has struggled to make a dent in the streaming market and has seen more clear water opening up between it and the market leaders. It also has shallower pockets than Spotify, Apple or Amazon. This deal gives Tidal access to Sprint’s customer base, free marketing (well free to Tidal at least) and a war chest to take on the streaming incumbents. Tidal is not about to suddenly become the global streaming leader but it can now, with a fair wind, become a serious player in the US.

 

Yonder Music Unlocks The Emerging Market Opportunity

One of the high profile digital music casualties of recent years was the failed ‘next generation’ service provider Beyond Oblivion. There were numerous factors behind Beyond Oblivion’s failure but a key one was the fact the market was not yet ready for its telco bundled music offering. Now 5 years on the digital music and telco content markets are very different propositions, with the number of telco music bundles global totaling 105, up from 43 in 2014.  With the proliferation of data plans and smartphones, mobile carriers are now eagerly seeking out streaming music and video services as a means of driving subscriber uptake, ARPU and market differentiation. The 11.5 million telco bundled music subscribers that now exist globally represent a vibrant marketplace that was almost non-existent back in 2011. So why the potted history? Because, as MIDIA reported back in November 2015 Beyond Oblivion’s founder Adam Kidron is back for another bite of the Apple with a new take on the model with his latest venture Yonder. Now, 7 months after its Malaysian launch Yonder has racked up an number of impressive regional metrics that act as further evidence that the telco market is ripe for music bundles.

Yonder’s partnership with a number of Axiata telcos in multiple markets is off to a flying start. Yonder’s music bundle is available across a range of tariffs including both pre-paid and post paid. With an already sizeable 300,000 strong subscriber base Yonder users are using markedly more data than users of other music services on the same tariffs. But of most interest from a telco perspective is the much lower rates of churn for Axiata’s Yonder users, on both pre-paid and paid. Though these numbers must be caveated by the fact that Yonder is available on tariffs that appeal to Axiata’s most valuable and loyal customers – a caveat that applies to most music telco bundles. But even with that considered, Yonder users have a fraction of the churn even of other same tariff users that do not have Yonder.

Axiata has demonstrated its belief in Yonder by both taking a 25% stake in Yonder and by committing to launching in another 9 emerging market territories, with further markets in the pipeline.

Axiata, Celcom’s parent company, has demonstrated its belief in Yonder by both taking a 25% stake in Yonder and by committing to launching in another 9 emerging market territories, with further markets in the pipeline.

Curation And Pre-Pay Are Key 

Yonder has four key assets that that have driven success so far:

1. A curated content offering
2. A telco optimized business model
3. A focus on emerging markets
4. An offering for pre-pay customers

Emerging Markets Are The Next Big Streaming Opportunity

Emerging markets are the next big opportunity for digital music. Western markets dominated the 20^th century music industry because it was built on buying units of pre-recorded media and thus skewed towards countries with high levels of disposable income. Now though, as we move into the streaming era, it is consumption that is monetized and thus it is the markets with the biggest populations (typically emerging markets) that represent the bigger opportunity. This realignment of the music industry’s world order won’t happen overnight, and the big western markets will still dominate, but a realignment is taking place. The obvious way to capitalize on this is ad supported (which is YouTube’s big play) and indeed that is where the big numbers will come. But it is telco bundles that will drive the meaningful revenue in these markets because:

1. telcos have the billing relationships (a crucial asset as credit card penetration is typically low)
2. telcos can shoulder some or all of the cost to drive data plan uptake and make the music feel like free

Crucially, in order to tap this emerging market opportunity, the standard, premium AYCE offering is not enough. Curation and Pay As You Go (PAYG) bundling are the assets needed to unlock this opportunity and right now Yonder and MusicQubed’s MTV Trax are pretty much the only services bringing this combination to market.

2016 is already proving to be a big year for the big streaming services, but with finite remaining growth opportunity remaining in developed markets, the really interesting long term growth lies in PAYG and emerging markets.

The telco music market statistics quoted in this report are featured in the MIDiA report ‘Telco Music Strategy: Ironing Out The Strategic Kinks As Objectives Evolve’ which is available to MIDiA subscribers and can also be bought individually on the MIDiA report store herebought individually on the MIDiA report store here

This post was amended on June 28th

Streaming’s First Steps into 2014

2013 was a big year for streaming, with the IFPI reporting total trade revenues of $1.1 billion and a total of 28 million subscribers globally.  2014 will be a crucial year and today Rhapsody revealed its contribution to the growing global picture.

As of April 2014 there are 1.7 million global subscribers to Napster and Rhapsody, up from a little over 1 million in April 2013.  Those numbers were boosted in part by the transition of Sonora customers in Latin America from Rhapsody’s October deal with Telefonica in which the Spanish telco reported would amount to the transition of ‘hundreds of thousands of existing customers’. 

Digital Colonialism

Latin America is undergoing something of a digital gold rush with European and US companies seeking to ‘colonize’ the digital market like modern day conquistadors.  It is a real pity that more is not being done by indigenous services. ‘Digital colonialism’ aside, Rhapsody’s Lat Am focus is part of a wider recognition of the importance of emerging markets to the longer term viability of the digital market.  How these markets adopt digital will play an increasingly influential role in shaping global strategy.  In some markets the download will have a long term transition technology role, acting as the digital stepping stone between the CD and access based models.  In others, there will be a technology leapfrog effect with consumers going straight to access based models, in a similar way that many consumers in emerging markets skipped the PC web entirely and went straight to the mobile web.

Super Cheap Flat Rate Access

What is clear though, is that the available spending power of emerging market consumers is far lower than in US, Europe and especially than in the prosperous Nordics.  So the 9.99 model simply doesn’t apply.  Labels are already heavily discounting wholesale rates for emerging markets but the likelihood is that the majority of customers will be monetized with hard bundles, with the consumer paying nothing.  This is a different model from telco bundles in western markets where telcos invest heavily as strategic marketing efforts (and typically lose money).  Instead, emerging market bundles will be long term offers, a permanent feature of mobile packages.  Telcos pay far less to labels but get much bigger scale.  The risk of heavily devaluing music is moot, as in the territories this model works in, music already has zero value to consumers as a monetary proposition.

Scale Does Not Impact Everyone in the Same Way

Back over in the western world, where the vast majority of streaming revenues currently are  (c. 90% to be precise), some of the initial sheen is beginning to fade.  Beggars Group have long been positive exponents of the streaming model and have rightly earned plaudits for paying artists 50/50 net receipt deals. However last night Beggars’ head of strategy Simon Wheeler intimated that those rates may not be sustainable.  The main reason is that streaming is such a key part of digital revenues now that the 50/50 share damages under-pressure margins.  But it is also because of the operational costs of streaming for a label (vast quantities of data to account – ‘billions of lines of data’, bandwidth costs etc.).  This highlights an issue I have been talking about for a while, namely that the great bright hope of scale (i.e. ‘when we reach scale, streaming will make commercial sense to everyone’) does not apply equally across the digital music value chain.  If you are a big label or publisher with a big catalogue of repertoire you will measure the impact of a million new subscribers in terms of millions of new dollars each month.  Scale benefits you well.  But if you are a single artist with just a few albums you will measure the impact of that same 1 million new subscribers in terms of hundreds of dollars a month.  Beggars Group sits somewhere in the middle of that scale-impact continuum.

The counter balancing of good news story / bad news story is nothing new to streaming, and it will continue to characterize the evolution of the market in 2014.  The shift from distribution models to consumption models is arguably the most dramatic transition the recorded music industry has ever been through, and consequently the change will have seismic repercussions.  Streaming revenue will come of age in 2014, but as it does so expect more speed bumps along the way.

New Report: Building the New Business Case for Bundled Music Services

Today MIDiA Consulting is proud to announce the release of a white paper commissioned by Universal Music entitled “Building the New Business Case for Bundled Music Services”.  The report, written by myself and MIDiA Consulting co-founder Keith Jopling, provides an unprecedented analysis of telco music services, taking a critical look at what has and had not worked to date and a series of models and recommendations for the future.  We interviewed a host of telco music executives to get a deep understanding of what telcos need out of music services to make them a success and combined this insight with data from consumer surveys and music service trials as well as case studies and best practices.  We think it is pretty much the definitive piece of work on the topic (!) and we invite you to download it here: Building the New Business Case for Bundled Music Services – FULL REPORT.  You can also download an executive summary version of the report here: Building the New Business Case for Bundled Music Services – EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.

Here are some of the key findings of the report.

The consumer shift from downloads to streaming is the most important digital music market trend since the advent of the iTunes Music Store.  Before streaming services telcos struggled to find a way in which they could compete in a market dominated by Apple, restricted to selling DRM locked downloads that of course would not play on Apple devices.  Subscription services changed all of that, with the leading streaming services all pursuing robust telco partnership strategies as well as a number of download subscription services.  There are now nearly 50 telco music service partnerships live in six regions across the globe.  With 40% of streaming consumers now paying to stream, generating $1.2 billion in trade revenue in 2012 the opportunity is clear.

However it is clear that many of the hurdles that telcos faced in the last decade continue to pose challenges.  These include music not being a priority for many telcos, internal business casing getting in the way of building compelling services and the wrong success metrics being used.

The new success stories of telco music services are those that make music a strategic priority.  This is not some sop to the record labels, but a reflection of what it takes to make music strategy a success. If a telco just adds music to a long list of Value Added Services (VAS) it will wither on the vine.  But if a telco puts a music service front and centre and positions around it then success is far more likely.  Success stories that have followed this approach include Telia Sonera’s hard bundle with Spotify in Sweden and Cricket Wireless’ Muve Music in the US.

The Role of Promotional Offers

For all the obvious synergies of telco music bundles there is a real danger that hard bundles that make music subscriptions free or feel like free to the end user run the risk of devaluing the proposition.  Yet it is also clear that consumers need to be able to ‘suck it and see’ before subscribing so promotional free trials and limited period bundles present a strong balance of value to the consumer, cost effectiveness to the telco and protecting the integral value of music for artists and labels.  The market data for free trial is compelling: half of one month trialists convert to a paid subscription at the end of the promotional offer period.

Customer Satisfaction, the New Music Service Opportunity

An entirely new aspect to music bundling that we dive into in the report is the role of music subscriptions in driving customer satisfaction across a telco’s wider business.  Even the most edgy, cleverly positioned challenger telco is ultimately a provider of important products but not usually a consumer passion point.  Music though has that brand passion secret sauce and partnering with the right music service can enhance the telco’s own brand and customer sentiment.  Smart integration of music into the customer journey and integration with customer satisfaction measurement tools, particularly Net Promoter Score (NPS) can enable telcos to create a customer satisfaction halo effect.  With music converting satisfied music subscription customers into highly vocal net promoters with satisfaction benefits felt across the full range of a telco’s services.

Bundled music services did not get off to the best of starts, but now their time has come, giving telcos the opportunity to assume centre stage in the digital music marketplace.

For more information on the research please feel free to email us at info AT midiaconsulting DOT COM.

About MIDiA Consulting

MIDiA Consulting is a boutique, media industry focused consultancy that delivers practical, results-driven outcomes.  MIDiA stands for Media Insights & Decisions in Action. Our mission is to help media and technology companies develop purposeful strategies quickly through market understanding, clarity of vision, and workable innovation.

We help media and technology companies make sense of the changes that digital market forces are bringing about. And we help them make profits from digital content.

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