Hewlett Packard, one of the biggest desktop manufacturers, has announced its plans to operate a music download and streaming supscription service called MusicStation, operated in conjunction with a company called Omnifone and installed by default on all of their new PC’s, desktops and laptops alike. This service looks set to enter the market and compete directly with services like Emusic and Spotify, charging a monthly subscription, variable by territory, but coming in at around $14.50 USD. The service will allow subscribers to stream and listen to as many songs as they like, and keep 10 DRM free downloads forever, even after they cancel their subscription.
The User Interface will have to be good to justify the premuim over Spotify’s sub price, although the ability to keep downloads is an incentive. The service seems a sort of halfway house between the bigger success stories of the nascent digital music market, iTunes, Emusic, Spotify… Even though it’s not a particularly innovative product, HP have a similar advantage in that they can build hardware that interfaces smoothly with their software, and get their product in the hands of anyone who buys their machines, just as Apple do with their desktops. That said, Microsoft’s Zune failed to make the impact they’d hoped, despite the fact that it had some nice functional advantages over the iPod and their software runs on the vast majority of PC’s worldwide. Given the facility with which software can be obtained, I think HP’s project will live or die by the quality of its interface, and keeping up with Spotify on that front will be a hard task.
Some of our UK readers may already be aware of Martin Lewis – he runs a consumer advocate website called moneysavingexpert.com [prepare your eyeballs for a 90's throwback website] that details all kind of cheap offers on high street products and financial services. Despite the lack of their front end aesthetic, his web developers have clearly got some savvy, as they’ve built a site called TuneChecker that collects price information from a range of online music download stores – Amazon, iTunes, Orange, Tesco etc. and delivers you a comparison. Clicks through their site that end up in a purchase will then be feeding an affiliate percentage back to Mr. Lewis and co. Happily for our digital distribution customers, Amazon and iTunes come out on top most frequently, so it can only help RouteNote artist’s sales.
For the music buying public, this exposes the sometimes eyebrow-raisingly large price differences between stores (Orange are almost 2x the price of Amazon in our example), and will have a balancing effect on the price of a download album – which is what their main website is all about.
Sony’s new MyPlay store is live, and they’re hoping they can claw back some of their sales margin from iTunes, currently the biggest outlet online. Doubtless this will have some effect, especially if they plug it into the Play Station Network, but I don’t think they’ll really be able to take much market share away from iTunes, eMusic or the other established download stores, as their catalogue won’t be comprehensive. Unless they sign deals with the other majors to sell their content too, which seems unlikely to happen – why would EMI want to give Sony an advantage? – then the twin pitfalls of limited catalogue and people’s unwillingness to open and run multiple credit-card accounts will hinder their progress. Unless they gouge their competition heavily on the pricing of their own product, they’ll remain a minority player in the download market.
YouScrobble is an interesting little offering that allows you to build playlists, watch video and download tracks, using the Last.FM and YouTube catalogues. I’m not wholly convinced that they asked permission to use these resources in the building of their site, but it does make for a convenient music search and discovery engine… Of course, there’s no reason you couldn’t flick between Last.FM and YouTube building playlists for yourself, but this is a quick and nice way of doing it in one place and of sharing it with friends and/or potential fans.
From their “about” page:
Enjoy YouScrobble and discover a new experience of searching, listening and downloading music of any kind and genre! Sign up for free and get to know all great features of YouScrobble.
- Discover the biggest music library on the web.
- Listen to and download your favourite music for free.
- Get personal statistics of all listened and downloaded tracks.
- Share your music favours with your family and friends.
- Stay up to date with the latest changes and improvements.
Buy premium tracks and download faster and even if your daily download limit is reached! Check out the YouScrobble Premium membership soon.
Of course – that premium fee will be going to pay the licensing fees on the tracks that are listened to and downloaded, right YouScrobble?
We have noticed that one of the worlds leading mobile stores has shut down their service for a limited time. GroupieTunes has shut down their website so they can revamp it and then relaunch. I find this a little weird as because in the meantime while the new site is being developed the company is makingno revenues. It seems like they are just wasting their traffic and hurting their SEO and customers.
It would be great to hear your thoughts on GroupieTunes and their previous service.
Loading ...
