TechnoCloud

Spotify’s premium music service, which includes its offline playlists, is coming to the Symbian operating system (owned by Nokia).

The new version mainly supports Nokia phones, including popular models like the 5800 XpressMusic and E72, but also supports Samsung’s Omnia HD and Sony Ericsson’s new Satio.

The premium service, £9.99 a month, is already available on iPhone and Android phones.

What would be very interesting to see would be the take-up to date on their iPhone and Android offers, as I’ve yet to see any figures. With tendency to pay on mobile higher than on desktop internet, and the offline playlists a valuable feature to those accessing the service on a mobile, can mobile be the tipping point to monetising their service?

YouTube’s latest experiment at live broadcasting, the decidedly A-list U2 concert from the Rose Bowl attracted a broadcast size audience of 10m. Given its premium content, it’s too early to say whether this is a tipping point for internet video or indeed YouTube’s live broadcasting ambitions, but nonetheless it’s an impressive figure.

The concert was made available to 187 countries, including China, North Korea and Iran, with a third of the 10m viewers based in the US.

Google has entered the online music market with a new service for finding and buying music online, OneBox, through a partnership with music sites Lala and MySpace-owned iLike. The US-only service allows people to search using song titles, artists or snippets of lyrics. The songs are then available as ad-supported streams and paid downloads.

As the service appears in Google’s search results, it provides an alternative (albeit streaming rather than free downloads) to illegal torrents when searching for tracks.

Another week, another Spotify business model, this time a bundled subscription to Spotify’s premium service on HTC’s Hero Android Smartphone which is available on the UK’s 3 network. For a £35 a month tariff, plus a £99 fee (similar to iPhone pricing), users get two years of Spotify’s premium service included in the deal.

They may have their work cut out after leaked figures emerged for Nokia’s similar ‘Comes with Music’ service indicating they had only signed up 107,000 customers since their January launch, albeit on a less impressive handset.

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).

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?

See it in action here:

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.

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.

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.