Spotify unveil the future of music

Ad supported music streaming service Spotify has been talking about its plans to go mobile for a while now and judging by this clip of the work in progress Android app those plans are coming along very nicely indeed!

The liberation of Spotify from the desktop and onto mobile marks not only a revolution in music consumption but may also gives us a clue as to what the future "networked" home might feel like.

The key challenge facing the music industry is often defined as the battle of paid-for content vs. pirated content but I think what is really going here is a shift away from models of consumer ownership to models of consumer access.  In the old days you had to own a physical copy to be able to play something whenever you wanted.  Its clear from technology such as this it is that ownership - whether physical or digital - is not necessary or even desirable (given the needs to store & manage a library).  Perhaps I'm being a little optimistic here, but prevalence of illegal peer-to-peer networks could be seen as a transitionary phase in the march towards this model of "always on" access.  When you can get what you want whenever you want why go through the bother and risk of accessing these illegal networks?

The music business has long been accused of missing the digital boat when Napster first revolutionised the industry but its support of services such as Spotify and we7 show it is they who are leading the way as to how the digital future may look for the cultural industries.  With Sky rumoured to be soon launching a music streaming service (Sky Songs), its not hard to imagine a scenario whereby all music, TV, film etc is delivered via the internet to a single home receiver that then wirelessly connects to your TVs, hi-fis, computers and mobile devices.  With people like Sky then in control of distribution it would then appear that labels can get back to concentrating on marketing and building artist brands.  With consumers facing unlimited choices, getting them to find your artist will then be the major issue facing labels rather than losing sales to the pirates.

Fans become band producers in new Cold War Kids video

Hot on the heels of Empire of the Sun, Cold War Kids have also created an interactive video to help promote their new single I've Seen Enough.

Rather than adding interactive elements to their standard promo (see Empire of the Sun), the band have instead opted to partner with MTV to create a bespoke widget where fans can remix / re-produce the song by selecting a range of different instruments for the Kids to play.

The band start off with their basic set up of piano, guitar, drums and bass, but the feel of the song is very quickly changed when alternative instruments are introduced (or even band members muted).  I'm a big fan of a fully electro version that can be created by selecting all the "green" instruments.

Playing around with all the different combinations is fun despite some slight buffering delays.  While the widget also includes the expected social sharing features it doesn't look like its possible to save and share your own version (I was quite keen to post my electro version here but had to settle for a static image).  There is a Fans Favourites link which I would expect to include this feature but I couldn't get any joy out of it so maybe its just me!

Either way this is another example of how bands are using interactive technology and trends to give fans more reasons to spend time with, remember and hopefully promote their efforts.  The partnership with MTV should also give them an extra audience boost as no doubt they will also be directing viewers to this feature on their site. 

London Evening Standard promises to do better but can they compete with free?

The newly rebranded London Evening Standard is currently embarking on a campaign to help win back readers from the freesheets. Launching with the "Sorry" message last week, the campaign is due to evolve into a series of promises that will see the paper attempt to move away from its image as being negative and complacent.


While the campaign will no doubt get London's media & advertising community talking, it will be interesting to see if this campaign is able to reach out and connect with its broader target audience. The key question is whether the campaign can persuade an ever-increasing number of Londoner's to ditch their free and easy freesheets and fork out 50p for their end of day dose of news and entertainment.


With both the londonpaper and London Lite boasting readerships of around the 1m mark compared to LES's paid-for circ of just 144k the size of the task is clear. In this context, LES's circulation woes can be viewed as structural rather than the result of a poor product. Put another way, the real problem facing LES is whether there is a sustainable market for an evening paid-for newspaper in London at all. Accepting this as the key challenge, is the new campaign likely to be a success?


The key strategic question facing paid-for content providers in a context dominated by free providers is best summarised by Kevin Kelly in his blog Better than Free. Although this discussion relates specifically to the digital world where copies of all sorts of content are freely available at no cost, the parallels with LES are clear. When the freesheets can credibly claim to be more convenient (Accessibility, Findability, Immediacy) it seems that it is in the areas of Interpretation and possibly Authenticity that LES can best demonstrate it is adding value.


The freesheets are famously light on detailed comment and analysis, so this must be a central pillar for LES. I am not sure the "Sorry / Promise" campaign can be said to deliver against this. Furthermore, judging by todays headline of "City Tycoon: My Secret Lovelife" it appears that is not where editorial policy is heading anyway. If LES is going to attempt to beat the freesheets at their own game then they will surely fail.


Thinking about Authenticity, can LES lay claim to being the title for London and derive value from that? Clearly the rebrand to include the great city's name in the title is a move towards this, but can the same be said of the "Sorry / Promise" campaign? The freesheets vibrant (albeit lightweight) editorial take on city life & celebrity culture feel like a much better representation of London in this day and age and for me only the ES Mag really competes with this.


In a world where convenience is key it feels that both the new campaign and rebrand in general will not do enough to change the reading habits of the majority of London commuters. While I don't doubt there is still a market for a paid-for title I think the reality is that this market is likely to be structurally small and declining and that this campaign will not be able to affect this trend in the long term. Worse still I fear the marketing activities and change in direction will actually be a turn off for the last few remaining loyal LES readers and actually hasten its decline.

Twitter search spam

The growth follwing Twitter's recent PR attention seems to be entering a new phase as some of the web's less salubrious inhabitants are being drawn to the platform. Search results against any of today's top trending topics return a page full of what can only be described as spam tweets. A search against #jonaslive returned the following:

For those without a magnifying glass, Kelly_Johnson is in short keen for us to check out her webcam (I didn't by the way!) and is using multiple tweets featuring all the day's top trending topics in the hope of driving some free traffic.

Does this kind of activity mark the beginning of the end for Trending Topics usefulness or at least its ease of use? Even if Twitter techies can filter out spam like this it seems clear that some consideration for relevance to user is central to search and trending topics future appeal.

Thankfully a recent announcement by Santosh Jayaram (Twitter's new VP of Operations) indicated that such considerations are very much part of their plans. By adding link crawling and reputation ranking to their search results, Twitter hope to enter the "real" search space dominated by Google (see Mashable for details).

With their ever growing audience and the attendant risk of spam detailed above the addition of such functionality will certainly help users make sense of Twitter chatter and cannot come quickly enough in my opinion.

UPDATE: Since writing and posting this Kelly_Johnson has become KellyWilliams (in a bid to avoid being barred?) and now only seems to dominate the #Q&A thread. This would seem to indicate that activity on against #Q&A is much lower than the other top topics.