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Posts Tagged ‘rdio’

Facebook, music services work in harmony

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, internet, Investments, Market research, mobile 2.0, Social Networks, Technology, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Facebook members have listened to more than 1.5 billion songs in the six weeks since the social network rolled out its latest Open Graph applications platform.

And the online music services that have hitched their wagon to Facebook are flourishing, according to stats posted on the company’s developers blog.

“As a result, some of our biggest music developers have more than doubled their active users, while earlier-stage startups and services starting with a smaller base have seen anywhere between a 2-10x increase in active users,” Facebook’s Casey Maloney Rosales Muller wrote. “It’s still early, but these results show that the Open Graph can be a powerful discovery mechanism for users and drive significant growth for developers.”

One big winner so far is Spotify, the online music service that just expanded to the United States in the summer. Since announcing it was plugging into the beta Open Graph protocol at the F8 developers’ conference Sept. 22, Spotify has gained more than 4 million new users.

And Earbits, the company that also powers SFGate Radio, has recorded a 1,350 percent increase in the number of users who become fans of bands they’re hearing, he said.

Meanwhile, MOG has grown 246 percent, Rdio has seen a 30-fold increase, Slacker reports an 11-fold increase and Deezer has added 10,000 users.

Ticketing sites Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and Ticketfly have also reported $2 to $6 in direct ticket sales for each link shared within Facebook.

And all this has happened before Facebook has had a chance to roll out Open Graph and new Timeline user profiles to a wider portion of its audience of 800 million users. The Palo Alto company says those rollouts are coming soon.”

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Facebook music rumors revived as BandPage startup gets cash

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, web 3.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“RootMusic, a San Francisco startup that helps artists such as Rihanna, Katy Perry and Arcade Fire connect with their Facebook fans, received additional venture funding Wednesday amid reports that the social-networking giant is close to offering its own music service.

RootMusic, which says it has about 32 million monthly active users for its BandPage platform on Facebook, announced a $16 million round of financing led by GCV Capital.

The platform adds a page for fans to hear and share songs, watch video and view concert dates. The company was started in March 2010, but already more than 250,000 bands around the world use BandPage, and usage has increased tenfold since January, said RootMusic CEO J Sider.

There have been various reports that Facebook is ready to release its own music service. On Tuesday, CNBC, Mashable and other outlets reported that Facebook plans to announce a music platform at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco on Sept. 22, with Spotify, MOG and Rdio as partners.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu would not comment directly on those reports or what’s coming for f8, but said in a statement that “many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”

Sider said he views a potential Facebook music platform as complementary to BandPage.

“If something like this would happen, it would raise awareness that as a fan, (Facebook’s) where I should go first to find information.”

The Facebook music drumbeat might prove to be sour notes for former social-networking rival Myspace, which has been trying to reposition itself as a destination for music. Indeed, RootMusic’s slogan entices musicians to “Make the Move to BandPage on Facebook.”

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Will Amazon cloud service rain on Apple’s parade?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Here’s how effortless it is to move your digital music collection from Apple’s iTunes software to Amazon’s new Cloud Drive music service:

1. Visit Amazon.com, enter your user name and password, and find the link that says “upload files.”

2. Agree to the terms of service and solve a Captcha, one of those tricky image-recognition puzzles that prove you’re an human being.

3. Download Amazon’s MP3 uploader software, which scans the music on your hard drive.

4. Select about 1,000 of the gazillion songs you own and mark them for upload.

5. Wait around six hours for the upload to finish.

6. Download Amazon’s separate Cloud Player app for Android to stream that music to your phone, or use a Web browser to listen to it from any PC.

Sounds easy, right?

Welcome to the awkward stage of the digital music revolution. Online song sales have stagnated, depriving the endangered music industry of one of its last remaining lifelines. Yet digital music continues to be a vital battleground for Google, Apple and Amazon to try to lure users to their other devices and online offerings.

Now, Jeff Bezos & Co. have boldly tried to leapfrog Google and Apple in the quest to liberate people from the decade-old practice of buying and downloading digital songs to a computer and then manually transferring them between devices.

The idea behind “cloud music” is to let people stream their music collections from the Web to any computer or device. Analysts believe such services are inevitable – even if Amazon stumbles.

“Having access to your music on all your devices has to be the starting point of any next-generation music service and product,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research.

That’s the vision, but right now, the convoluted uploading process is the result of key trade-offs Amazon made to get to the cloud music market before its rivals.

Licensing deals

First, major labels want new licensing arrangements for cloud services and a bigger cut of the online music pie. Their demands have slowed down the introduction of cloud music features, and Amazon designed its service without their permission, instigating a wave of complaints from Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

“We’re disappointed by their decision to launch without a license,” said Brian Garrity, a spokesman for Sony.

Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for music and movies, claims Amazon “highly values” its relationship with the labels, but compares uploading songs to the legally harmless practice of attaching a hard drive to your PC and transferring music files to it.

Amazon primarily designed a service to comply with copyright laws – not to make shifting music to the cloud seamless. Amazon requires users to upload their own copies of songs that it could more easily supply from its digital store. Services like MyPlay and Mp3tunes have tried the same basic approach over the years. None attracted many users.

Amazon, which controls only about 13 percent of the digital music market despite four years of battling iTunes, apparently believes it has unique advantages in the coming cloud music battle.

Thanks to the massive server capacity backing its successful cloud computing business, in which it rents computing power to other companies, Amazon can offer its streaming music users 5 gigabytes of music storage for free, or 20 GB if they buy just one album from Amazon. The company is also prominently advertising the service on its home page.

“We observed from our other digital media businesses that buy-once, play-anywhere really resonates with consumers,” Carr said.

The service Amazon released last week has been criticized for being difficult to use and incompatible with Apple iPads and iPhones.

Not social

“There’s nothing social about it. How can you launch anything on the Web today that doesn’t integrate social?” said David Pakman, the former chief executive of eMusic and a partner at Palo Alto venture capital firm Venrock.

David Hyman, founder of Berkeley music subscription service Mog, says of Amazon’s cloud offering: “It’s a stepping-stone. This is Amazon putting its feet in and testing the waters.”

So what does the future of cloud music look like? Google, Apple or Amazon might finally get the major-label licenses that will allow them to make storing music collections in the cloud seamless for users. (Instead of uploading each song, the service could simply scan the names of songs in a collection and reproduce them in the cloud.) Or subscription music services such as Mog, Rdio and Rhapsody that offer unlimited access to a broad catalog of Web-based music for a monthly fee may find the mainstream success that has long eluded them.

Such an unlimited cloud music offering may be Amazon’s ultimate goal; Carr doesn’t rule out developing a music subscription service and offering it for free to members of Amazon Prime.

“This is an exciting Day One,” he said of Cloud Drive. “We always have an open mind.”

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