Taking Digital Music To The Mainstream: The Music Product Features For The Living Room

[Posted by Mark Mulligan]

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What is interesting in the current scramble for the killer online music business model is that there is an implicit assumption that the only place people would want to go from the CD is online or mobile.  The iPod heralded a new paradigm in music consumption, but it has done little to counter the impact of the CD's terminal decline and may even have helped accelerate it.

 

As things currently stand, the mass market music consumer isn’t being catered to with any form of new product and the fight for these consumers’ living room is being lost.  It wasn't too long ago that the home hi-fi system was the flagship piece of living-room technology but over the past decade, living-room tech spending has shifted firmly to the TV while the aging home hi-fi system is either gathering dust or has been replaced by a docking station. (The latter of which is an awkward attempt to make a personal device a household device, and besides, the majority of households don’t even have one).

 

The time has come for new music products and experiences that cater for the mass market and that - for the non-tech savvy majority - bring the home music experience into the 21^st century.  In our latest report ‘Taking Digital Music To The Mainstream: The Music Product Features For The Living Room’ Forrester puts forward a vision of what we think is needed. 

 

We propose that the new mass market music experience must be explicitly part of a new hardware experience that is contemporary but highly competitively priced.  Our conceptual technology is a hard drive, midi-sized music hi-fi that with a detachable touch screen display / remote control. We argue that the new hardware must:

 

• Deliver a compelling experience even if not connected: it’s just too risky to assume that mainstream consumers will have the inclination or know-how to connect a music product to a home network, even if they have one.
• Include extensive music at point of purchase: this is, we think, the crucial element.  Mainstream consumers don’t have the appetite for another format replacement cycle, so we suggest the device should effectively replace their entire CD collection and add more, all for the cost of the device.  (And yes, we know this is light years away from where current licensing values are). And in case you didn’t notice – we just invented a new music consumption paradigm here, and a new role for retail.
• Provide the tools for baby steps into the digital world: for those consumers that do connect we propose a convenient range of digital discovery and acquisition applications to encourage consumers towards the digital arena.
• Leverage telcos: we want these devices to be affordable, but to really go mass market they probably need subsidizing by a telco e.g. a Sky Songs broadband package would include the device bundled with the router.

 

Of course there are many other ways this challenge can be met, but met it must be. Unless the music industry enters the battle for the living room, it will soon lose it — and with it the mainstream music consumer.

If you are a Forrester client and would like to discuss the report in more detail then please schedule a call with our client inquiry team.

If you are press and would like more information on the report please email Press AT Forrester DOT COM

Music Subscriptions wherefore art thou?

[Posted by Mark Mulligan]

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With paid music downloads falling far short of offsetting the impact of declining CD sales, next generation subscription services need to succeed if recorded music sales are ever going to come out of their nose dive.  There is certainly lots of supply side activity, with services launched or announced in the last year from, Nokia, Spotify, TDC, Sky, Virgin Media to name but a few. And the incumbents have been busy reworking their offerings (cf Napster’s new 50%-price-cut-with-MP3s play).

 

Music subscription services have a lot of history but not a huge amount of success, so what gives the current new crop any chance of survival, let alone success?  The key will be hiding some or more of the cost to the consumer and adding real value.  The bottom line is that many consumers are simply unwilling to pay for music and even fewer are interested in paying a monthly fee for it.  So success lies in making the services free or ‘feel like free’ to the end user, subsidizing the costs through savings to, or increased revenue from other core products.  TDC, the Danish telco, has pioneered this approach with its free-to-consumer service that is available only to its customers.  (A cynic might argue that Spotify is doing the same, subsidizing its free offering with VC funding!) 

 

TDC Play has enjoyed strong adoption (100 million downloads in 15 months, not bad for a country of just 5 million, and yes, that does translate to 20 tracks for every single Dane).  Crucially though, TDC reports that Play is delivering strong benefits to their core business, which in the end is what the service is all about.

 

But not everyone is having so much success giving music away to consumers (you’d think it would be a straightforward enough task right?).  Reports have  emerged that Nokia has acquired just 100,000 Comes With Music subscribers across 9 international territories, one year after UK launch.  I remain a firm believer in the Comes With Music business model and value proposition (free unlimited music on your phone and PC that you keep for ever, the entire cost hidden in the handset and tariff).  But there is not question that 100,000 subscribers after one year is nowhere near enough return for Nokia. Nokia needs to up its game, (and indeed is doing so) because if they don’t someone else will.

 

Mobile is becoming an increasingly important element of the next gen subscription services. Spotify are using mobility as they key driver for their paid offering and are even playing the subsidized game as well with a partnership with 3 in the UK.

 

There is no lack of service innovation, but there needs to be some consistency in the experimentation. For example, what value does Sky Songs deliver for 7.99 GBP for unlimited streams and some MP3s that Napster doesn’t for 5 GBP? 

 

Continued product innovation will of course be key to feels-like-free subscriptions becoming a success, but unless this is done within a consistent framework, consumers will remain largely disinterested except for the occasional service that gets its positioning right (e.g. TDC).  Whilst that would be good news for a few companies, it could be little short of catastrophic for the music industry.

Sky Songs: First Take

[Posted by Mark Mulligan]

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Finally we get to see some fruits of the labour of the protracted negotiations between the UK music industry and the ISPs.  Sky’s long mooted service - Sky Songs - will go live on the 19^th October with content from all the majors, powered by Omnifone  In doing so Sky brings three major assets to the table:

• a scale of marketing clout and expertise that other music subscription services could only dream of
• proven and deep understanding of packaging and marketing entertainment products
• a large installed base of premium customers to target

 

At launch the service is to be marketed to all UK broadband customers rather than explicitly to Sky customers. This gives a wide addressable market, but it does mean that two other key assets are currently untapped:

• bundling this offer with Sky TV packages
• integration with Sky’s hardware

 

Sky does though, leave these as distinct possibilities on the road map, which is very wise as they could prove to be the secret sauce that could make Sky Songs a success.

 

Sky also do one other very smart thing that will stand them in good stead: they enable customers to ‘dip in an out’ rather than locking them in to a year’s commitment.  This is added to competitive pricing:

 

• pay £6.49 and download either a £6.49 album or 10 songs, and receive unlimited access to listen to over four million songs online for one month; or
• pay £7.99 and download either a £7.99 album or 15 songs, and receive unlimited access to listen to over four million songs online for one month.

 

I can’t emphasize enough how important the ‘dipping in and out’ should prove for Sky Songs.  UK and other European consumers have proven largely unwilling to pay premium subscriptions services and even in the US no premium music subscription service has broken the 1 million subscribers mark.  Napster’s recent price slashing is indicative of the challenges facing the incumbents.  The bottom line is that most music buyers don’t spend the amount of money that a monthly subscription fee is equivalent to, however good value for money it might be.  The annual cost of Sky Songs would be £79 or £96. By way of comparison per capita annual music spend in the UK is just £2 whilst the average spend per UK music buyer is closer to £6.  And the unlimited streaming part isn’t that much added value anymore: Spotify’s UK success has made free streaming table stakes, not a premium add-on.

 

All of which is why Sky’s decision to allow customers to effectively use the service as a good value a la carte album purchase with free streaming is so smart.  But I hope they’re similarly smart to market it that way as they educate the customer base.  Sky almost single handedly educated the UK market about the concept of TV subscriptions, now they need to do the same for music subscriptions. 

 

Music subscriptions looked like a dead man walking in 2008, but over the last couple of years the space has had new life breathed into it with a series of next generation iterations, including:

• Nokia’s Comes With Music
• Spotify Premium
• Virgin Media’s Unlimited MP3 service
• Datz Music Lounge
• Music Station
• Sky Songs

 

All of these differ markedly from each other, and that is exactly the point.  The days of the 9.99 rental streams as the future of subscriptions are gone.  The mantra of one size does not fit all applies keenly to the music subscription space.

 

This isn’t to say Sky Songs will be an instant run away success – it will probably spend a while fine tuning its proposition and positioning – but once it starts leveraging all of its assets it stand as good a chance as anyone of making the model work.  Perhaps most importantly, it heralds a crucial shift in the role of ISPs from fat pipes for illegal downloading to conduits for premium revenue.  The outflow of industry value down the ISPs pipes might finally be changing course to a partial inflow of value.

 

Forrester has recently published a report on ISP music services.  Clients can read it here.