By now, you’ll have hopefully seen our news story last night on the appointment of Topspin’s Ian Rogers as CEO of Daisy, the upcoming subscription music service from Beats.
After we broke the news, we sat in on a conference call with Rogers and Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine / COO Luke Wood to get some more details on plans for the service, which also has Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor as its chief creative officer.
Some facts: Daisy isn’t likely to launch until the second half of 2013; pricing hasn’t yet been finalised; but the service will be, in Rogers’ words: “Mobile-first: iOS, Android, Windows 8 but also desktop”.
Beats COO Luke Wood added that Daisy will be global and “in as many territories as humanly possible”, with Rogers adding a bullish note: “Our mission here is to win, and to win we need to be global.”
Separately, Topspin’s Bob Moczydlowsky blogged about how his company’s integration with Daisy will work: “Topspin GoDirect will become the way the Daisy service gets photos, videos and products from artists, and both companies will work together to make sure fans see those products when they listen to songs.”
One bone to pick with Daisy is its rhetoric around competitors, with Iovine claiming “Right now, these things are all utilities: ‘Give me your credit card, here’s 12m songs, and good luck’,” and Rogers saying Daisy users are “not just going to get a search box”.
That’s deliberately ignoring the fact that Spotify for one a.) clearly understands this problem too and b.) has talked in a lot more depth than Daisy about its plans to make curation and discovery much more central to its service.
This battle isn’t about a brand-new curatorial paradigm competing against a nerdy search box, in other words, even if it’s understandable why Beats and Daisy want to frame it that way in advance of their launch.
The fight between Daisy and Spotify (and Deezer and Rhapsody and Xbox Music and…) is much more interesting than that, as they try to take music subscriptions into the mainstream.
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