Why Spotify May Change the Digital Music Landscape [GUEST POST]
This post was written by Jesse Langley, who lives near Chicago. He divides his time among work, writing and family life. He has a keen interest in blogging and social media and also advocates for online education. Mr. Langley writes for Professional Intern.
In the ongoing digital music revolution no clear winner has yet emerged. But Spotify is looking like a game changer already. Pandora proved a watershed in terms of the ability to move away from the record company-controlled, CD-oriented musical experience. Pandora gives even young school kids the kind of wide-ranging exposure to music that only serious audiophiles used to have. Today’s average college kid can have more familiarity with a wider array of artists and genres than the average music critic did in the 70’s. I still find that people use Pandora partly to sample music in an eclectic way, and partly to buy the albums of artists they really love.
Where Pandora fails — and I’ve griped and groused about this before — is in not allowing old school album lovers to enjoy the whole album experience. I compare it to being allowed to read one random chapter in a great book and then having it yanked out from under your nose and then replaced with a different novel altogether. Spotify sidesteps this problem completely by allowing users to stream entire albums. Think of it as a much cooler Pandora that also lets you download music. For $9.99 per month, Spotify gives you access to over fifteen million songs. You can download up to three thousand songs at a time to your computer to listen to later offline. In addition, there are now iPhone and Android apps for Spotify as well.
Spotify’s U.S. Launch
Spotify has had a strong presence in Europe for a while, and only recently launched in the United States. The late launch here was due to lengthy negotiations with U.S. record companies. Now that it’s finally here though, it appears poised to change the digital music landscape.
Previous iTunes challengers essentially just imitated the iTunes model. That was never a winning formula. iTunes already had brand recognition and customer loyalty, which both take a long time to build. Besides, the iTunes imitators were never able to offer anything better. Grooveshark, for example, often doesn’t work well and frequently you can’t find artists at all.
The Freemium Model
One of the reasons Spotify is positioned so well to change the digital music landscape is that it’s not just another poor imitation. iTunes has always been incredibly wary of a subscription-based music service and that may prove to be just the edge that Spotify needs to penetrate the digital music market. Pandora’s runaway success proves that a subscription-based service has the potential to generate huge revenues.
Like Pandora, Spotify offers free music streaming too. The free version doesn’t allow downloads and there are occasional, though not annoying, advertisements to support the free version. One of the features of the advertising that works really well is the introduction of new bands. Instead of just hearing new music with no context, you can actually learn about the band and hear the music in context. There is also a section that lists new albums that are available so you can check out new music as it becomes available, rather than discovering it almost accidentally the way you do with Pandora. This allows you to be more deliberate and intentional about your musical discovery process.
Social Integration
Another dimension of Spotify that could help push it to the top quickly is found in the social media integration aspect of the music service. The Facebook interface lets you see what your friends are listening to. This is a pretty cool feature because it provides a way to discover music by checking out what your friends are into — sort of re-creating the word-of-mouth aspect in the virtual world which was such a big part of musical discovery back in the old days of vinyl albums.
If Spotify keeps performing the way it is currently and doesn’t start hiking prices or limiting free music streaming hours per month, they may emerge as the clear winner in the digital music revolution.
[Image Credit: Click here]
