Late to the online party
I’m in the process of updating my aging music system. Now my kids are old enough to no longer feel compelled to poke fingers into the tweeter domes on my loudspeakers, it’s time to dust off my 25-year-old kit and upgrade.
While the dominant school of thought around sound systems are inbuilt systems that combine home theatre with streaming technology, I show my age by holding onto a discrete rack of standalone components and a pair of loudspeakers.
To the extreme amusement of my friends I’ve also got a stack of content media – both CDs and records.
My turntable is a bit of a dinosaur, it’s a Scottish Linn Sondek with a platter that weights as much as a small Japanese car.
It was my first major purchase after leaving university and getting a real job.
It’s got zero electronics and any fool can understand it, you just turn it on and lift the tonearm onto the vinyl.
People are having a harder time understanding Apple Music the latest music offering from Apple, the people who revolutionised the music industry back in 2003 with the launch of iTunes.
iTunes was an online music store that let folks download music at 99 cents per song, share it across devices and store it on hard drives and in the cloud.
Freed from having to steal music through online ripping services like Napster, people proved to be equally happy to download it.
So happy they’ve done it close to 50 billion times.
But the world moved on as did business models.
Where there are a stack of them, Spotify probably best epitomises the new world where content resides in the cloud, follows you everywhere and you effectively have unlimited choice of music.
Launched as a Swedish startup in 2008, Spotify sits on your computer or mobile and gives you free basic content peppered with advertisement, or better quality content without advertisements if you pay $12.99 a month.
While enjoying revenues of over US$1 billion (NZ$1.48b), Spotify are still firmly in the red; delivering losses of close to US$200 million last year. But they do have content. As of today they have about 30 million songs on file and 75 million users (of whom about a third choose to pay).
That 30 million figure has quickly become an industry benchmark as most mainstream music streaming services have close to that figure.
The secret sauce of Spotify is the ability to get that music for free, so long as you are online and prepared to put up with the ads.
The newly launched Apple iMusic doesn’t have the same ability. Instead they have gone with a three-month free trial, then they make you pay.
This is a pretty canny product move. There are an orchard full of Apple fans out there that can be relied on to pick up any new Apple offering.
What’s more if they already have an iTunes Match account it will allow mixing between their streaming choices and their iTunes downloads.
Three months will give these Apple fans long enough to compile a heap of playlists and fine tune the predictive radio tools, and at the end of those three months they won’t want to lose them.
So most likely they will cough up the first $12.99 and the default ‘‘on’’ setting for recurring billing will take care of itself after that.
But not everyone will feel that way. For one thing it’s not just a two-horse race between the freemium Spotify and the paid Apple Music.
I count a dozen online streaming services in the market now, and the muddled communications around the launch of Apple Music – variously described by commentators as ‘‘sloppy’’ ‘‘confusing’’ and ‘‘a hot mess’’ won’t help Apple establish a natural lead in what is already a very competitive market.
Vox Media’s The Verge did a comparison of the eight largest services – including Google Play, Tidal, Amazon Prime and Rdo – and found a surprising amount of parity. All offer around 30 million tracks, offline playback, personalised radio and bitrates of 256kps or better.
What’s more, apart from Spotify’s basic access being free, they all cost about the same – all around $12.99 for an individual and ‘‘family’’ deals of $19.99 allowing multiple devices.
Individual users might prefer the user interface of one over another but there aren’t any killers aps that automatically makes one better than another, unless you count Taylor Swift’s ‘‘1989’’ album.
So that takes things back to money, which probably means Spotify’s ongoing free access in exchange for being subjected to ads is likely to remain the only real competitive advantage in an over supplied market.
The funny thing about my old Linn turntable is I’ll probably get the money back I paid for it 25 years ago, as they are still being made new today.
Somehow I doubt that many of the 12 odd music streaming services will quite so long-lived.