A week ago Xbox Live started integrating Zune, Twitter, Facebook and Last.fm into its gaming platform Xbox 360 via the ‘collectives’ update. Especially the integration of Last.fm is worth checking out as it resulted in one million fans creating custom radio stations on Last.fm. For Last.fm it has been the biggest growth spurt they’ve had since launching back in 2002. It remains to be seen if the growth will be permanent but it looks like it that Last.fm has found new fans where not many other have been looking for them before: inside games.
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admin on Friday, November 27th, 2009 (LastFM)
CBS-owned Last.fm will launch Last.tv starting in January. Last.tv will initially include content from music festivals in Europe, either through “building bespoke events or partnering with existing festivals” as MusicWeek puts it. Parent company CBS is currently lining up sponsors and the service is also expected to incorporate both pre- and post-roll video ads. The url www.last.tv is already available but redirects to www.last.fm as expected.
At the moment Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify and Rhapsody (plus all related companies) are paying to stream content to people when they already have that song locally. “Criminal” says Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones who launched the open source project Playdar in a chat with Wire.
Playdar is built around the since ‘long’ forgotten XSPF (XML Shareable Playlist Format) developed in 2004 by a group of programmers and digital music geeks including Ian Rogers of Grand Royal, Yahoo, and TopSpin Media, Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz and Lucas Gonze. The format allows people to share playlists with each other without worrying about keeping directory paths intact. The technology has now been picked up again by Playdar.
Built as an open-source software platform, Playdar knows the location of all the music on your computer and home network. Combined with services and plug-ins through its open architecture, it will enable music services to save money on bandwidth and… license fees. Because indeed, why should music services pay license fees for music that is already on your PC to start with?
Integrated (here we go again), the program could detect when you are streaming a song you have on your PC and play it from there. Gone is the license fee owed by the Spotifys of this world to the labels.
One loophole that the Wire lads forgot to think about: what to do with illegal content stored on a PC?
At the moment Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify and Rhapsody (plus all related companies) are paying to stream content to people when they already have that song locally. “Criminal” says Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones in a chat with Wire. And Jones has the sollution with his open source project Playdar.
Playdar is built around the since ‘long’ forgotten XSPF (XML Shareable Playlist Format) developed in 2004 by a group of programmers and digital music geeks including Ian Rogers of Grand Royal, Yahoo, and TopSpin Media, Robert Kaye of MusicBrainz and Lucas Gonze. The format allows people to share playlists with each other without worrying about keeping directory paths intact. The technology has now been picked up again by Playdar.
The one year old internet radio service Spotify needs more time to develop its business – read ‘to make profit’. In a post on the company’s blog, co-founder Daniel Ek says that Spotify “has a long way to go” in order to avoid joining dozens of other startups in what he calls the “digital music graveyard”. And he adds: “Yet this is unfortunately something the music industry as a whole is particularly good at, expecting business models to be proven within months of inception.” Nevertheless the company’s advertising revenues have now passed the millions of Euros per month mark.
However he also welcomes the support the company has gotten from the music industry: “Spotify has a long way to go but this continued support from the music industry in the face of a recession and rampant piracy has made the difference and I feel that we are set up to succeed with this kind of willingness to innovate and try new things from the music industry… together we can do even better things.”
Stockholm and London based Spotify offers users free music on demand if they also listen to adverts. Advertising-free services are available as well by subscribing for £10 a month. With more than 5 million users signing up to use it, it’s one of the fastes growing legal music services around. Despite this the company is buning money fast with streaming costs hitting the roof. Spotify so far has raised more than €71 million from investors and tries to lower its million euro monthly cost by integrating peer-to-peer technology and other ways to save bandwidth.
Ek added however that it is intention to solve the problem of making money from music streaming and not simply sell out to the highest bidder: “We are in this for the long haul. We aren’t interested in just trying to hype the company and then ‘flipping it’.”
Nice to know is that the Spotify ounder also acknowledges to not having always acted with the company’s patners (artists, composers, labels etc.) in mind: “Someone asked me a while back, during a fireside chat, what was the biggest mistake I’ve made so far with Spotify? I can’t recall my answer, but I’ve since thought more about the question. I would say that the biggest mistake that I’ve made is that Spotify, unlike any of the other businesses I’ve been a part of, depends on our partners (artists, composers, labels etc.) and I haven’t always acted with this fact at the forefront of my mind. If we’re asking the industry to change, we need to be transparent and honest about the end goal – especially since we’re asking everyone to make a huge leap of faith to an unknown place where you could potentially argue that the industry risks its most profitable customers. We haven’t been as open as we could have been up until now, and that’s been an oversight on my behalf.”
Spotify will also invest in a couple of focus areas in terms of developing the product. Besides better monetisation, those areas include better library handling, making Spotify socially capable as well as significantly improving the portability ) – read ‘iPhone and related applications’.
Ek also pleads that the industry needs to think outside of the box and realise that the new business model in music is a mix between ad-supported music, downloads, subscriptions, merchandising and ticketing where the user comes first and where the key to monetisation comes from portability and packaging access rights. “I believe this is something that most people in the industry can agree to, but it can’t happen if the industry continues to enforce the per-play fees it has tried so hard to hold on to. The new model is about figuring out how to increase the revenue per user (RPU) between the different models – not squeeze as much as possible out of every single transaction. And that is how we can grow the overall business and work to protect a business that is in decline.”
In the past streaming music services have found it difficult to generate (any) profit largely due to the costs of licensing. That other dotcom darling Last.fm even had to close down advertising-supported services in some areas because it could not cover costs. The American online radio service Pandora from its side has been locked in a battle over royalty payments.
The one year old internet radio service Spotify needs more time to develop its business – read ‘to make profit’. In a post on the company’s blog, co-founder Daniel Ek says that Spotify “has a long way to go” in order to avoid joining dozens of other startups in what he calls the “digital music graveyard”. And he adds: “Yet this is unfortunately something the music industry as a whole is particularly good at, expecting business models to be proven within months of inception.” Nevertheless the company’s advertising revenues have now passed the millions of Euros per month mark.
However he also welcomes the support the company has gotten from the music industry: “Spotify has a long way to go but this continued support from the music industry in the face of a recession and rampant piracy has made the difference and I feel that we are set up to succeed with this kind of willingness to innovate and try new things from the music industry… together we can do even better things.”
Stockholm and London based Spotify offers users free music on demand if they also listen to adverts. Advertising-free services are available as well by subscribing for £10 a month. With more than 5 million users signing up to use it, it’s one of the fastes growing legal music services around. Despite this the company is buning money fast with streaming costs hitting the roof. Spotify so far has raised more than €71 million from investors and tries to lower its million euro monthly cost by integrating peer-to-peer technology and other ways to save bandwidth. iayz2gv4qk
