Archive for: napster
Here at RouteNote we are always trying to improve our digital music distribution service. On Friday we announced the launch of three new partners, Napster, Deezer and Thumbplay. If you are a new artist to RouteNote then you can easily signup to take advantage of these new partners straight away. However, if you are an existing RouteNote artist you need to do the following steps:
- Login and Head to your My Content section
- Select the Edit button for each track you want to add to the new partners (Thumbplay, Napster and Deezer).
- Select the new partners via the Tick boxes (or select all button)
- Hit Save Changes and your Done!!
Here at RouteNote we are always looking to add new partners for all our artists. Stay tuned for even more coming soon!
Good news for all you RouteNote artists out there: today we go live with music distribution to three new music stores – Deezer, Napster and Thumbplay Mobile.
Deezer is a French business, but has agreements with all 4 major labels to stream ad-supported music to their 9 million registered users across 35 different countries. In the three years since its launch, Deezer has been voted the most innovative website of 2007 by readers of 01Net, ahead of both Facebook and Dailymotion. Deezer also won the 2008 Red Herring award, for Europe’s most innovative web companies, among various other awards. The proof of their success is really in the number of people listening to music through their service, which keeps on growing. In addition to their music streaming service, Deezer also offers:
- Access to radio channels: Hip Hop, Rock, Electro, Jazz, Live, French Scene, Disco etc.
- Surfing intelligent online radio
- Information about artists, albums, tracks, introducing subscribers to new music
- Sharing playlists, chat and musical tastes with friends via the community of ‘Deezernautes’
- Watch videos
Napster was the first cat among the digital pigeons with it’s peer to peer service, but they’ve come a long way since their rebellious beginnings, and now their subscription service offers both unlimited streaming and a number of DRM free downloads per month, available online and on smartphones in Europe and the USA.
Thumbplay is the largest mobile content provider in the U.S. Operating both web based and mobile services, including licensed music, video and games. They have deals with all the majors, and several independent labels and artists, and now you can get access to their services through RouteNote. Hundreds of millions of cellphones in the US are waiting to download your music.
To get your music live with these music stores and all our other online music partners, sign up for our music distribution service, and get our new music upload tool. You can have your tracks online in minutes, and earning you money in a matter of weeks.
Napster originated as a peer-to-peer music service in 1999, one of the first that gained widespread popularity. Unlike modern bit-torrent services it provided a connection between users through a central server, and this direct involvement in the file-sharing process rendered it vulnerable to a slew of lawsuits brought by (to name but a few) Metallica, Dr. Dre, Madonna, A&M records and Bertelsmann Gruppe.
These lawsuits culminated in Napster’s bankruptcy, and its purchase at the bankruptcy auction by Roxio (of CD burning fame) – who have converted it into a subscription streaming service. Users can pay GBP£5 a month for unlimited streams from Napster’s 8 million strong catalogue, plus 5 tracks to download and keep as MP3s. There’s also the option to buy download tracks on an a-la-carte basis once you’re subscribed. In addition to this, Napster also provides a free streaming site, with limited functionality, and access to three quarters of its catalogue. Users can’t make playlists from this site, and it’s a lot slower and harder to use than the subscription platform.
The subscription service is cheaper than Spotify Premium or eMusic, its closest competitors in terms of service, and the fact that all of Napster’s members are subscribers makes it’s income much more reliable than the advertising based model that still makes up the bulk of Spotify’s trading, (the Economist reported that only 40,000 of the 6 million users who had downloaded the free platform have subscribed to the premium service) and thus better able to provide a steady income to it’s contributing artists, were it not for the odd addition of it’s free streaming service to the mix. Napster’s operations seem a little confused, different elements pulling in different directions from one another; a steady income from the subscription service, with a clunky ad supported option detracting from it; a limited MP3 download service clashing with both and yet failing to make it easy for users to take music away from their PC’s. If they could centralise all of these elements into a neat platform and make it easy to use, they’d have a model that looked a bit like Spotify’s, but it’s yet to be seen whether that can be turned into a profitable business in the long term.
Napster, the pioneer of digital music, today announced subscribers can now access their account at m.napster.com from most web-enabled phones, regardless of carrier. Subscribers can now browse, search, preview and use account credits to download tracks “over the air” from Napster’s library of more than nine million songs.
Napster customers currently receive five MP3s and unlimited listening on the PC for $5 per month. Beginning today, they can redeem credits and download tracks “over the air,” as well as receive a back-up MP3 copy for their PC – at no additional cost. Consumers can also create a new account or add credits to an existing account directly from their phone using a Napster prepaid card.
“Napster subscribers can now discover and download music at anytime on more phones from just about any carrier,” said Brad Duea, Napster president. “This is one of the strongest steps we’ve made to date toward our goal of making Napster and music accessible anytime, anywhere.”
To promote the debut of m.napster.com, and celebrate September as “Music Month,” Best Buy will offer $15 worth of Napster music (15 songs to keep and three months of unlimited listening on the PC) at no charge with the purchase of any contract mobile phone.
“Mobile phones are becoming the focal point for how people connect with their world, and music is a big piece of that,” said Jude Buckley, chief marketing and merchant officer for Best Buy Mobile. “Our customers want to be able to download and listen to music no matter where they are, and now Napster makes it accessible and simple to get music on any type of mobile phone.”
Today’s debut of m.napster.com is the first of many initiatives coming from Napster in the near future that exemplify the company’s strategy of making music instantly available from everywhere one might be.
A lot of people get in touch with us to ask how many digital stores we distribute music to, and what proportion of the digital music market they represent. We also hear comments on the relatively small number of people we deal with in comparison to the huge lists of partners at some of our competitors, e.g. CDbaby, Emubands, IODA…(without mentioning the duplication in the last two).
The simple truth is that while a long list of digital music stores might look good, beyond the top 3 or 4 retailers it makes very little difference to overall sales how many your music’s in. It’s fairly common knowledge that iTunes is the biggest player in the market, but the scale of their dominance is pretty staggering. Neilsen (the ratings and market reporting firm) reports total US music sales of 1,513 million units in 2008, with 1070 million of those sales being digital downloads. That’s a billion digital music downloads across the entire US.
In 2008, across all territories, iTunes sold more than Two Billion tracks.
| Apple iTunes Store Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/08/2004 |
100 |
| 16/12/2004 |
200 |
| 02/03/2005 |
300 |
| 10/05/2005 |
400 |
| 18/07/2005 |
500 |
| 10/01/2006 |
850 |
| 23/02/2006 |
1,000 |
| 12/09/2006 |
1,500 |
| 10/01/2007 |
2,000 |
| 09/04/2007 |
2,500 |
| 31/07/2007 |
3,000 |
| 15/01/2008 |
4,000 |
| 19/06/2008 |
5,000 |
| 06/01/2009 |
6,000 |
Excuse the horrid old excel graph, I’m still running Office ‘03…
It’s difficult to get a believable estimate for the size of the global digital music market, but given that the USA is the biggest single economy by a long way (the whole of the EU only just beats it in the CIA factbook at $14.98 trillion to $14.58 trillion), you begin to get a picture of how much of a monopoly iTunes has. Their competitors are of a different order: Amazon weighed in at 27 million digital tracks sold in the first six months of 2008, and the CEO of eMusic (David Pakman) estimated that Amazon have got about 4%-5% of the US music market, which going from Neilsen’s estimates puts them at about 48,150,000 tracks annually. Pakman also claims an approx. 10%-15% market share for eMusic, with 7 million downloads sold monthly (7*12 = 84).
By browsing eMusic’s sales milestone press releases, you can plot a rough course for their sales:
| eMusic Digital Music Sales |
| Date |
Tracks Sold (Millions) |
| 01/09/2004 |
0 |
| 01/12/2004 |
3 |
| 01/12/2006 |
100 |
| 25/09/2007 |
160 |
| 14/04/2008 |
200 |
| 20/11/2008 |
250 |
I’ll spare you another ugly graph. eMusic has sold 250 million tracks since it’s relaunch in 2004, and Amazon’s only been going for about a year now, 300 million tracks let’s say, which pales beside iTunes’ 6 billion total sales.
One can argue with the estimates, but the main thrust of my argument is hopefully becoming clear. A conservative 15% market share between Amazon and eMusic, along with iTunes’ >80% doesn’t leave more than 5% for any other players in the USA: with just those three selling your music for you online, you’ve got 95% of the market covered. It’s not that the remaining 5% isn’t worth catering to, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and customers in the last few percentiles get harder and harder to chase down, especially given the plethora of blossoming and failing little music shops that appear and dissappear. We concentrate our efforts on the vendors that matter.
P.S.
The controversial bulk of music discovery and consumption in the electronic wilderness, outside the paid-for enclosure, is happening on torrent sites like the embattled Pirate Bay, and the more respectable Limewire and Mininova, and promoting RouteNote artists on these channels is something we’re looking into. Ubiquitous innovator Trent Reznor or NIN positively encourages people to download his music from P2P networks, in order to drive sales of his ‘premium’ paid for content.
Napster has hinted that the company is up for sale again, saying in its response to a dissident shareholder group that the company is once again exploring possible strategic alternatives, and has retained UBS Investment Bank to assist in the process. The company hired UBS two years ago to explore a possible sale, but no deal emerged. Napster informed shareholders of the move in a letter that also said the company believes that three proposed dissident board candidates are “unqualified.”
The company said the dissident candidates “have offered no specific business plan, other than suggesting a vague review of Napster’s business,” and also “have no significant ownership in Napster and, in fact, have been frequent sellers of Napster stock.”
Napster instead urged shareholders to re-elect its current slate of independent directors.
Source: DMW Media
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