Music Ally

Last night saw a joint presentation by Spotify and PRS for Music in Edinburgh, which included a stack of stats on how the streaming music service is doing here.

Want some figures? Back in July, Spotify already had 2.7 million users in the UK, with more males than females. Half of them are over 30, but the biggest single age group is 20-29 year-olds, who accounted for 1.1 million (40.7%).

In the six months to the end of July this year, more than four million tracks were available to stream in the UK, of which three million were accessed, generating more than one billion streams in total. Light relief came with a question on whether the male bias means Spotify could help stem the population explosion. “As long as they don’t play Barry White,” replied director of content Niklas Ivarsson.

We’ll have a full report on the presentation later this morning, so stand by.

Napster has announced the launch of a new version of its Napster Unlimited service in the UK, offering unlimited streaming music plus five MP3s to keep every month, for a monthly subscription fee of £5.

The service provides streaming access to Napster’s eight-million strong catalogue, and the company claims it will offer many tracks that rivals don’t. The service can be accessed from any computer, PC or Mac, and will include playlists, ad-free radio stations and recommendations. Mobile is also tied in – users can preview and download MP3s from the mobile website, with backup MP3 files sent to their PCs too.

The launch isn’t a complete surprise, as Napster launched a $5 version in the US in May this year. However, its launch in the UK comes against a backdrop of competition from Spotify’s new offline mode, Nokia’s Comes With Music, and the soon-to-launch unlimited services from ISPs BSkyB and Virgin Media.

Napster will be promoting the new service in Carphone Warehouse stores around the UK, offering customers a one-month free trial. Both Napster and Carphone Warehouse are subsidaries of US retail chain Best Buy, so this is one of the first examples of them working together in this way.

UK streaming music firm we7 is understandably chuffed about being ranked first in Experian Hitwise’s chart of the most popular UK music sites based on pageviews. CEO Steve Purdham describes it as a “significant milestone”.

Our first reaction is congratulations. we7 has worked hard in the last year to refine its service and forge partnerships to promote it, and its top ranking reflects this. It clearly sets some store by the Hitwise rankings, as back in May, we7 claimed to be the fastest growing UK music site according to Hitwise’s data.

But that’s where our reservations begin. Just how useful is Hitwise’s chart really? Here’s the top 10 from the latest chart, as supplied to us by we7:

(more…)

Last month, Music Ally hosted a couple of sessions at the Reeperbahn Campus conference in Hamburg, including one on the crossover between music and gaming. Embedded above is our introductory presentation outlining ten current trends in music games.

It’s very much a summary, and bullet-point focused (you miss out on the rambling commentary, which may be a good or bad thing depending on your point of view). Anyway, we thought we’d post it here.

Sorry, the stat doesn’t get any more vague than that, but Spotify has announced in a celebratory one-year-since-launch blog post that its service is streaming billions of tracks every month, and that “tens of thousands” of new users are joining every day.

“Over the past year we’ve worked hard to continue to improve Spotify,” continues the post. “We’ve more than doubled the size of our music catalogue over the year and work continues to add more content each week. We’ve added features to allow you to buy your favorite music, play music when your connection drops out and most significantly to take Spotify with you while on the move.”

Spotify has done a marvellous job of creating a buzz around its service in the last year, and much of that buzz is justified by its excellent user experience. Of course, with an industry hat on, news that billions of songs are being streamed raises those perennial questions around licensing payments, and how soon Spotify will be making enough money in advertising and subscriptions to balance them out.

Spotify plans to take the wrappers off some of its usage data tonight, at an event in Edinburgh hosted by the Scottish Society of Computing and Law.

Director of content Niklas Ivarsson will take the stage with Will Page of PRS for Music to dish data on who is using Spotify in the UK broken down by age and gender, as well as how they are using it – demand curves for Spotify tracks contrasted with Page’s work on how music consumption patterns fit into Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory.

The demographics part should be interesting – it may dispel (or confirm) rumours that Spotify has been attracting so-called 50 Quid Man, and thus cannibalising CD sales. Or, more positively, Ivarsson may produce stats to show that the opposite is the case, and Spotify is putting a dent into illegal P2P use.

Take a look at this site. Remind you of anything? Yep, us too.

Birddi is the work of a 19-year-old Argentinian coder, who decided that not many Spanish speakers were using Twitter, so decided to create his own version. Except he’s gone a bit too far and copied the exact homepage, design and logo from Twitter.

“Birddi is simple – people are impatient and want to connect simply and quickly with friends,” says creator Martin De Lío. We suspect that Twitter’s lawyers will be connecting simply and quickly with him in the coming days to suggest a different look and feel. Although as Aliado Digital points out, Russian social network Vkontakte did a similar thing to Facebook, and has done pretty well out of it.

INgrooves boss Robb McDaniels has written an op-ed piece for Billboard warning of the challenges that the rise of streaming music poses for labels. He points out that indie labels in particular have “lived off cash flow for many years now”, including up-front advances – but that streaming threatens to cut off that model.

“It takes 150-200 plays of a song before the content owner earns royalties on par with one download. Content owners typically get paid 70 cents per download and half a penny per stream. How long does it take the average fan to stream a song 150 times–six months? Twelve months? Longer? There’s the cash-flow issue.”

McDaniels’ piece ties into one of the current controversial issues in the digital music world – whether streaming music services are cannibalising piracy more than they are cannibalising sales of CDs and downloads. The likes of Spotify and we7 would argue that a lot of those streaming pennies-per-stream are new – additional – revenues for labels generated by music fans who might otherwise be using P2P. But more data is needed to prove this point before labels – and their distributors – accept that argument.

European music retailer 7digital has launched its US store, undercutting iTunes with individual MP3 tracks selling for $0.77 and albums for $7.77. The launch ties in with the release of 7digital’s BlackBerry music store, but the company is also partnering with companies like Last.fm, Songbird and WinAmp – not to mention Spotify when that eventually launches in the US.

“By piggybacking on their reach, we can grab some meaningful market share,” says CEO Ben Drury, saying the company’s experience with Spotify in Europe indicates streaming does lead to paid downloads. “The price per unit is definitely plummeting – people will definitely spend less money on a track-by-track basis… but the volume of consumption will go up.”

iTunes is the dominant digital music retailer in the US – and even Amazon hasn’t made huge inroads into its market share. However, 7digital’s partnership-focused strategy gives it a shot at building a decent business there.

The ongoing saga over whether Palm’s Pre smartphone can or can’t synchronise with iTunes has another chapter, with Palm having restored the feature in the new release of its webOS smartphone software. Apple has blocked the feature twice now in iTunes updates, with Palm finding a workaround each time. We sense if neither side gives up, this could be heading to the courts.