As digital music startups go, 7Digital is one of the more established – and successful. Having been founded in 2004, it now has a catalogue of more than 11 million MP3 tracks, and two million registered customers globally for its D2C and B2B stores.Today, the company held an event in London to talk about its progress this year, and some of its new partnerships.”We think we’re moving to an era of instant on-demand access to media wherever you are,” said CEO Ben Drury. “Pretty soon you’ll be able to access connected music in your car, on your phone, in your hi-fi… everywhere.”7Digital announced several new partnerships, starting with Samsung. The company is powering the preloaded music store application on the new Android-powered Galaxy Tab tablet, which has just gone on sale in the UK.”I believe this is genuinely a contender against the iPad, but at the same time different,” said Drury. Samsung built the music hub using 7digital’s APIs. “We’re now working with Samsung to provide that on other devices besides tablets,” said Drury.A second deal was with Toshiba, whose European business manager Graeme Simons introduced the deal at this morning’s event. Toshiba is also launching an Android-powered tablet, the Folio, which goes on sale in November and is “considerably cheaper than the early entrant in the market” according to Simons.7digital is providing a music app for this device too, but Drury then introduced an even bigger deal, with O2.”Starting from now we’re going to be O2’s digital music partner in the UK across PC, mobile and connected devices,” said Drury.7digital also introduced some new products, starting with apps. The company’s BlackBerry app has now been installed more than 500,000 times, and is available in 20 countries.So what’s new? A new HTML5-based mobile web store that can run on most modern handsets, and scales up for tablets. It’ll launch at m.7digital.com in 32 countries in the coming weeks, but is live in the UK now.7digital also showed off its new Android app, which can sync music wirelessly, with streaming to come.There’s also an iPhone app with similar features. The latter is still in approval with Apple though, and 7digital said it’s having “positive discussions with them” about getting it onto the App Store. Which could be entertaining.7digital also showed a demo of its new website store, which will include editorial content and events listings from the BBC and Songkick, among other partners. It’s also quicker to use, and goes live this side of Christmas.The company also showed a new version of its cloud media player – the 7digital player – which runs in any modern browser using HTML and JavaScript (which also means it works on the iPad). It lets users play music from their 7digital lockers, while also getting recommendations for new tracks from the company’s store.Drury also pointed to changing trends among UK digital music buyers: “It seems this idea that consumers will only buy single tracks is false. We’re seeing significant growth in digital album sales.”He claimed that 7digital’s ratio of single-tracks to albums is much better than the overall market, and hailed the ongoing switch from physical to digital in the UK.”We predict that digital from a label’s perspective will overtake physical as early as the end of next year,” said Drury.7Digital is adding around 90,000 tracks a week – half of which are new releases, and half of which are back-catalogue. 7Digital now sells music in more than 30 countries, including the US, which he characterised as a notably tough market to do the necessary rights deals.”You look at Spotify, they haven’t been able to do that yet. It’s obviously quite tricky,” said Drury.7digital also talked about the progress of its APIs, which are opened up to external developers. And it showed off a demo of a work-in-progress image recognition app, which will let people photograph album covers, but also adverts, billboards and other artwork, and be able to preview tracks there and then.
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