TechnoCloud

The Spotify iPhone app has finally been approved by Apple, providing streaming, and more limited offline, access to Spotify’s music catalogue for premium users of the service (£9.99).

It’s been interesting to see the mixed reviews to what is an impressive service, if you’re willing to accept the price that is. Despite making it clear that you could only access the streaming service if you had a premium account, numerous reviewers have complained that their ‘free’ app hasn’t worked, showing the importance of managing expectations very clearly on a free app (or indeed a subscription based app).

Further to the news that Spotify will be offering downloads through 7Digital, details of a new all-you-can-listen subscription download model are emerging.

According to Revolution magazine, Spotify will be offering users unlimited downloads for £9.99 a month, the price it currently charges for the ad-free version of the service.

In a threat to the dominant player iTunes, there are also plans to extend this download service to mobile, allowing users to listen to tracks and playlists. There are as yet no details of any DRM that may be involved to limit use of the downloads to active subscribers of the proposed service.

The UK already has Nokia’s Comes with Music service which provides unlimited music downloads for 12 or 18 months, all included in the cost of the handset. However, reports in the media suggest this offer has failed to gain real traction yet with only 23,000 reported subscribers by April from its launch last year.

Spotify looks set to press ahead with its mix of models, from ad-supported, to ad-free subscriptions, to individual downloads and now this model of downloads subscription to find the best mix to monetise its service. Mobile and computer subscriptions will be a significant and welcome addition.

Update: Paid Content are claiming that Spotify won’t be offering this service with a quote from an unnamed Spotify figure denying Revolution’s story: “something we could never support or achieve. It’s just not sustainable and our focus is on access, not ownership, as we’ve always said”. So, who’s right? It’s too early to say for as yet unreleased service, but certainly the optimum balance of subscriptions and mobile remain on the agenda for Spotify.

Spotify’s new UK MD, Paul Brown, was interviewed just a day into the job by Paid Content UK. Whether a brave or foolish thing to do on your first day, he did have some interesting things to say about the service.

While careful not to reveal numbers, he strongly hinted that the much rumoured Spotify iPhone application would be a premium service as a way to drive paid subscribers in conjunction with access to rare archive material.

“Portability is something we’re looking at - if you get a great execution on a range of portable devices, I think there will be a proportion of the population that will pay for that.”

Given the ease of the payment model of the App Store, many Spotify users would be willing to pay a reasonable price for a premium app in order to stream music on-demand, particularly if they can access their playlists and stream albums.

This would be an improvement over the one-song-at-a-time YouTube application whose catalogue is currently limited by disputes with the music industry or the limited Last.fm artist radio service on their iPhone app.

This blog has been keeping a close eye on Spotify’s attempts to go mobile, but the desktop client is also progressing with news that Spotify have signed a deal with 7Digital to sell MP3 downloads.

The Spotify service is already monetised through advertising, a premium ad-free service for £9.99 a month and limited affiliate deals with Amazon and iTunes on a small portion of the catalogue. More integrated downloads are a natural next step and while the initial user journey involves checking out at 7Digital’s store, they hope to enable transactions within the Spotify client itself.

This will launch initially in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain with plans to roll out to Norway, Sweden and Finland.

The question is will the Spotify userbase embrace downloads, with suggestions that take-up for the ad-free service has been limited?

It certainly makes sense to cover their bases in terms of revenue models and in the absense of the mobile service, this will provide a way for users to take their new favourite tracks and soon albums and playlists with them on their portable media players, particularly if the 7Digital pricing stays competitive with the dominant player iTunes.

Indeed if and when the mobile service is launched, how might this affect the amount of potential downloads, where many may prefer ads on streamed tracks to paid downloads? However, there are significant technical barriers to overcome on any streamed service in terms of bandwidth and of course, for those commuters among us, underground travel.

This story has a way to run yet.

The history of the internet is littered with failed experiments to shoehorn print online. From PDFs simply stuck online, to ‘turn the page’ user interfaces, to a dump of reams of text into HTML, simply trying to replicate print online misses the point of what makes digital different.

Slowly though, momentum is building for digital print. Let’s look at some of the main reasons for this:

1) The relative success of the Kindle. While the reported 250k+ Kindle 1’s sold is not huge, it does demonstrate that there is a market for e-books delivered over a well designed device, even at an early adopter pricing point. The Kindle 2 will only advance this. Now we are even starting to see newspapers and magazines available in the Kindle store.

2) Related to the point above, the advances in e-book technology, seen in the Kindle and the Sony Reader (among others). I was somewhat cynical until I actually got one in my hands a couple of weeks back and yes, it really does look like paper. Flexible e-paper is also on its way.

3) Google and Amazon’s combined weight. Amazon announcing its intention to put all books into e-book format, Google putting 1.5m public domain works online and its settlement with publishers over out of print but in-copyright books.

4) Public domain works. From the complete works of Shakespeare in an iPhone app to the Canterbury Tales in a blog, Chaucer’s Tales, there are numerous ways that innovators are experimenting with delivering out of copyright public works.

5) The environment. Books are beautiful objects and remain my preferred reading format, but it’s a powerful argument to remove the physical print and distribution costs from the equation through an e-book.

6) Mobile. While reading a book on an iPhone is a far from ideal experience, it can be a convenient way to dip in and out of text when it’s difficult to lug around multiple books. Again I was previously a cynic until having the Complete Works of Shakespeare available to me via the iPhone app has helped me get back into old school texts and rediscover some of the Sonnets while stuck on The Tube.

Books are wonderful objects that are here to stay, but they are going to have to co-exist with e-books as the reading experience, search functionality and storage capacity of digital print starts to make an impact.

One of the most popular articles on Technocloud recently was a look into Spotify’s multi-media ambitions in a post called Spotify mobile where I noted a job advert on their site advertising for a Nokia S60 platform software engineer.

Those ambitions are slowly being realised if a video of a potential Spotify iPhone app is genuine (see below). The rumours are that it will allow premium users (£9.99/month) to stream tracks from the entire library as well as access to the all-important playlists and even caching when connected to Wi-Fi.

Streaming music is nothing new to the iPhone, with YouTube a default app and the Last.fm app allowing you to stream its artist radio stations. The key to the user experience are the playlists and the caching.

Alongside the technical challenges of streaming music to mobile, they do of course face one major hurdle. The iPhone app store has the right to refuse any app and is likely to be concerned by an app that streams music playlists to the phone given the potential effect on sales to its iTunes store.

There is also the question of battery life, with a streaming music app likely to consume considerably more power than the in-built itunes software on the phone.

They might overcome the technical challenges, it’s the business challenges that may well prove the harder.

Among the increasing number of ways to stream music legally (imeem, last.fm, youtube…), one service that has caught my eye is Spotify. At present a desktop application with ambitions to go multi-media, the service provides ad-supported (or ad-free for £9.99/month) European access to streamed versions from all the major music labels.

It’s iTunes-inspired interface is intuitive, with impressive artist profiles and even more impressive back catalogue. In fact it’s become something of a challenge to those I show the application to find an obscure band from their childhood not featured.

With physical music sales continuing to decline and digital sales not making up the shortfall, this service and others like it are going to accelerate that trend. Certainly, desktop-only and ad supported is not going to be for everyone, but it’s an acceptable trade-off for me, particularly if the service can go multi-media.

Interesting then to see a job posting on their site shows they are specifically looking for a Nokia S60 platform software engineer:

“We’re now looking for an outstanding software engineer who knows the ins and outs of C++ and the Nokia S60 platform like the back of his hand. You’ll help us make Spotify mobile and take part in changing the way people listen to music forever.”

Looks like Spotify mobile is coming soon.

Handy link for playing with Google mobile search via a computer browser when you’re not actually on the move…

Another day, another social network announces more mobile functionality. This time, US giant Facebook joins in the fun, even if many of the services were already available.

Joining in the push to get into the mobile space along with fellow heavyweights MySpace and Bebo, the enhanced Facebook service allows those with access and the required handset to surf their profile, upload photos and notes and send and receive Facebook texts. (Update: now Google’s orkut is getting in on the act).

The Facebook blog does make an interesting point about the connection between social networks and the mobile industry:

Facebook was invented to make sharing information with your friends easier and better. Mobile phones were invented for pretty much the same reason. People needed an easier and better way to get in touch with each other, and mobile phones made it happen.

So, a natural partnership it seems? Certainly the me-too race is on to ensure that no large social network is left behind when it comes to mobile, even if the strength of the revenue streams are as yet uncertain.

2007 is already proving a big year for mobile with Apple’s (or is it Cisco’s ) iPhone and the likes of Google, Yahoo and YouTube all getting in on the act with a series of services and partnerships. 2007 may well be the year when we find which services stick, before 2008 is the year when they start to pay.

In the reveal-all world of social networking, it’s no surprise to find a widget that allows you to share your TV viewing preferences on the web. The MeeVee listings service has developed a neat little Flash widget built on its listings and recommendations service. It works as a loyalty tool as well as a marketing tool for those with the debatable pleasure of discovering more about your viewing habits.

Unfortunately, it’s US only, so I can’t share the delights of my TV dinners here in London, so readers will have to make do with what I might be watching if I lived in New York. Fascinating, I think you’ll agree…

Geographical grumbles aside, it’s interesting to see that the service completes the circle by linking you through to a page to download the episode via iTunes or alternatives. It would be even more interesting to see this technology come to mobile to enable customised recommendations and downloads on the move. Now that would be something worth sharing with the world.