Spotify and lala.com – two different models from Europe / The US
Along with Twitter, the one “new” social network that seems to have broken through into the mainstream media in Europe (as it’s EU only for now) is Spotify, the online music streaming service. Music Machinery and Hyperbot have come up with some stats about its library (as Spotify doesn’t release them) to show how far its come.
In terms of music served up: Total tracks: 3,586,179, total albums: 319,106, total artists: 264,461. Hyperbot compares that “to an equally secretive Amazon who has 8,235,303 tracks from 748,112 albums for sale” to show that it has an impressive offering though there are still holes in the music library.
However, it’s the numbers that are really impressive. 28 new listeners sign up every minute, half of those from the UK, and it’s passed the one million user mark in this country. Depending on how you interpret the recent Nielsen stats claiming Twitter has a 60% churn rate, it could soon overtake Twitter when it comes to European users.
And brands seem fairly enthusiastic about it.
Ruth Mortimer of Marketing Week had a piece about branded Spotify playlists the other day, with talk of Nike, Ray-Ban and fashion retailer H&M as partners. The beer Carling has a section on its website where people can share Spotify playlists, and similarly MTV and the Body Shop teamed up to release ‘Play Safe’ soundtracks to support its Staying Alive (safe sex) charity.
Lala.com
Meanwhile over the States, Ben Kunz of Media Associates is talking about a music service with a slightly different model.
Where Spotify allows you to stream tracks for free, in exchange for listening to the odd advert (unless you pay a monthly subscription) lala.com only allows you to listen to it once. To play it anytime online as you would with Spotify you then pay 10 cents (£0.07) per track. Or you download the whole song for 89 cents.
However, as a bonus, Lala.com will upload your whole iTunes collection onto a central database, allowing you to access it anywhere where you are online.
Ben asks whether consumers will pay a micro-payment of 10 cents for something that only lives online. If Spotify comes to the US, maybe not:
”The challenge for Lala is it’s not quite as good as free (illegal) music, and it’s not quite as portable as the buckish (legal) tunes we’re used to purchasing. Given the trend of teens to run around with mobile gadgets and expect a zero cost for digital content, the real audience for Lala may be fortysomething business types willing to build a nice office music collection for 20 bucks.”
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As I mentioned in my recent fanboy post on Spotify, I think it is the free ad-supported model that will persist. Online, there is a tendency towards free as services get quickly commoditised. Lala’s online database doesn’t seem to be the “killer app” that justifies payment…