The long awaited Spotify iPhone application has been submitted to Apple for approval and already several details have emerged:
- Ability to take your playlists with you
- Download songs or playlists to listen offline
- Search for new tracks
- Of course being an iPhone app, you can’t run it in the background while using other applications, a major annoyance for the multi-taskers.
But, what of pricing? It is likely to be available to premium users paying the £9.99 a month for the ad-free, higher quality version of the tracks. This pricing would be key in ensuring a rosy future for Spotify and indeed its competitors’ subscription services with the challenge of getting all those free users to upgrade (2m in Europe is the touted number).
The other big question that remains is whether Apple will approve it given the challenge to the iTunes music store. Early indications are that they will.
With no subscription available as yet in iTunes, will Spotify’s alternative be compelling and how might Apple themselves respond with a subscription service remaining only a rumour at present?
An article summary caught my eye in the BBC Technology feed this morning: “Thousands of pieces of rubbish are to be tracked using sophisticated mobile tags…”
A click on the piece revealed it was actually about tracking household rubbish. Call me cynical, but surely that summary could equally be applied to most of Twitter?
Don’t get me wrong, I do see value in Twitter as a tool, but struggle to use it on anything like a regular basis due to the constant noise even a small number of followers generates.
There are endless debates in the industry about how to measure social media ROI and indeed even if you can or should. However, these almost exclusively focus on off-site activity on social networks, e.g. what benefits are there from a Facebook page or a Twitter profile.
What is missing are credible statistics that cover on-site social media functionality.
There are a multitude of white label social networks all promising to add varying degrees of social media functionality to your site from simple commenting, all the way to building a quasi social network around your site’s content. The problem is that case studies on the effectiveness of these types of functionality are very thin on the ground.
Specifically, what impact on traffic, site loyalty, ad returns is there by adding the likes of a forum, commenting, profiles, reviews, rating…?
There is the difficult question of how you separate the rating or comment from the post itself. However, you can track before/after introductions of functionality; likewise, you can track the activity on a forum as a separate section of the site. So where are the case studies?
I’ve seen a range of client testimonials from white label social networks, but these by their nature are cherry-picked examples to showcase a service. What we need are credible case studies from sites themselves and from media measurement firms to really demonstrate the case for social media ROI, something that would benefit the industry as a whole in terms of take up of these services.
If these case studies are already out there, great, link to them in the comments. If not, it’s time to start creating them.
Spotify’s music streaming service is trialling its first audiobook, appropriately enough Chris Anderson’s much hyped ‘Free: the future of a radical price’. This is available to users in the UK only.
Spotify remain coy over whether this will become a business for them, but hint that a successful trial may lead to further additions to the catalogue: “This is the first audiobook we’ve ever included in our catalogue. We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us…”
While Chris Anderson’s Free is by its subject matter an obvious candidate for ad-supported streaming, it will be interesting to see whether other publishers follow his lead. It does open up the question of whether Spotify will expand into other media, extending to podcasts or even video.