Spotify on the Future of Music Delivery

I sat in on the Future of Music Delivery Keynote interview with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and author Eliot Van Buskirk on the last day of SXSW Interactive. Buskirk's covered the digital media industry for ten years in various publications. This keynote was not nearly as crowded as the Evan Williams one was at the beginning, but definitely kept a lot more people hanging around through its entirety.

The first part of the keynote was essentially a product demo for Spotify, and I can't imagine that an hour of that would've kept people around (nothing against the service itself), but things got more interesting once it turned to more generalized conversation between the two on stage, about where digital music is going (if Spotify is in fact where it's gong). 

Spotify is quite popular in Europe, but has some licensing issues to work out before it can work here in the U.S. Ek says there could be slight changes made to Spotify for an American release if that happens. They are working on the next generation of Spotify, and pre-install deals will likely be key for the service's continued success. Ek says right now, you can go in and pick up a smartphone, it comes preinstalled with Spotify and you can get three to six months.

With the exception of the iPhone, most lack really good media players, says Ek. A lot of people use Spotify as a media player on Android/Nokia handsets, he says, and if you're a BlackBerry user, you want it to work with that too. "We want to enable your library on all of these devices," says Ek. "We want to make music like water."

One of the more interesting parts of the keynote was when Van Buskirk took a question from someone on Twitter about Spotify's advertising - something along the lines of if somebody listens to a lot of down-tempo music, will Spotify start filtering ads by mood?

He says they have targeting, and they continue to learn more about users, and more and more brands are discovering Spotify. "We've seen a lot of promising results with advertisers who have included artists," says Ek. He says click through rates have been 3, 4, and 5%. "If you look at traditional metrics, that's super high."

As far as the question asked, Ek says, "that's definitely something that we want to do."

You can figure out brand preferences, and if people are in the same demographic (like live in same place, listen to the same kind of music), they might get a different ad if they drive a BMW vs. an Audi, he says. He also says the ad model's "getting better every month."

On another note, Ek thinks playlists are the new mixtape. With Spotify, among other services, they can be shared with others. Spotify users (of which there are seven million), he says, have a hundred million playlists, and about thirty percent of playlists are albums. "A lot of people say the album is dead," says Ek. "I disagree  - maybe pricing needs to be adjusted..."

All in all, the future of music delivery, according to Spotify, appears to be that users should be able to access their music libraries from virtually any device (through the cloud), share playlists with friends, and they can subscribe and/or get highly targeted advertising.

A lot of work remains to be done as far as making this all a universal reality, but in a nutshell (at least with Spotify), this seems to be the vision for what's to come.

Problem With The iPad’s First Ad

Pre-sales for the iPad begin next week and the first orders will start shipping in weeks. So it grabbed my intention when Apple aired its first ads for the iPad during the Academy Awards and the only sign of music was a millisecond long flash of an old Doors album cover.

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Google Deletes Blogger Posts

Update: This article is nearly a year old, but pretty much the same thing is happening again (or still). A number of popular music blogs have been removed from Blogger, some are saying without warning. When we covered this before, Blogger Product Manager Rick Klau left us the following comment (as seen in the comments section):

Hi - I'm a product manager on Blogger, and I wanted to clarify a few things. Google only removes content when legally obligated, and under U.S. law, we are required to take down content when we receive a valid DMCA notice. When we we do this, we send an email to the blogger using the address associated with their account and submit the original DMCA notice to chillingeffects.org. If a blogger wishes to challenge the DMCA notice, they can file a counter notice, at which time the original DMCA complainant has 14 days to file suit, or we will reinstate the removed content. The whole policy is explained in more detail here: http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html.

A good reminder for our users is to ensure that the e-mail address associated with their blog is valid and an address they check regularly; any DMCA-related notices we send are sent to that address. You can also find more info or ask questions in our support forum at http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help.

At Blogger Buzz, the official blog for Blogger, Klau says:

Last summer, we updated our enforcement of the DMCA. Our current policy is that when we receive a DMCA complaint, we:

• Notify the blogger about the complaint by e-mail and on the Blogger dashboard.
• Reset the offending post to 'draft' status, allowing the blogger to remove the offending content.
• Send a copy of the complaint to ChillingEffects.org.

When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorized manner, we will remove the blog.

 

Original Article: Ryan Spaulding is a music blogger from Boston who runs the blog Ryan's Smashing Life, which is hosted by Google's Blogger. For some reason Blogger has been deleting some of his posts.

This story was unearthed earlier this month in an LA Weekly article that found the same thing happening to a number of Blogger users. I got in touch with Ryan to find out what he had to say about the situation, and the following interview is the product of that (Not all of Ryan's opinions necessarily reflect those of WebProNews).

Chris Crum:  First off, can I get a little background on the story in your words?

Ryan Spaulding: Beginning last summer, I slowly began to notice that several older posts were beginning to disappear. This didn’t come to my attention for some time since I wasn’t in the habit of reading old posts except when I pulled down the material. Sometimes I received emails from frustrated readers who were looking for a topic I had written on – only to find the post deleted.

I had no reason to think this was anything other than a software glitch at first. There were no takedown notices or emails in my inbox. Then the instances began stacking up – and I began comparing notices with other bloggers. What was initially a series of seemingly unconnected blog post disappearances – by fall, became the topic of discussion in blogger emails and chat rooms. The change of tactic of the industry and the poor handling of  it by blog-host Blogger (Google) was being seen as a conspiracy.

I have come to love blogging and the integration of a myriad of software add-ons to the blog. Like the vast majority of bloggers, I am not paid for my time, creativity or passion. It is because of my passion for this thing that many of us have come to feel betrayed when we learn that the host of our websites is now in the business of deleting our posts without warning! (It’s an issue of respect. Blogger has proven that they do not respect their own users. Despite the merits of our prior good conduct and years of loyal use of their blogging platform and software – we are considered guilty before having a chance to demonstrate our innocence or at the very least have a chance to pull down the offending material.) Yes, it’s an issue of respect.

CC:  How many other bloggers have you spoken with that have had similar experiences?

RS: About a dozen or more to start, but since the piece ran in LA Weekly, I have received email from dozens more vocalizing their support.

CC: Can you tell me exactly what the deleted posts consisted of?

RS: The types of posts removed break down into two basic groups:

The Deletion of Unsolicited Promotional Posts: A few of these missing posts were "unapproved" posts on signed bands. This means I promote a band’s project and use an mp3 I had seen given away in other locations on the web, and then wrote lengthy pieces, breaking down the songs into their themes and reviewed them based on merit. All pieces were positive and promotional in nature. I tend to not write negative reviews on music;  it runs contrary to the underlying theme of the blog – to support musicians whose work I enjoy. While it hurt to see these posts disappear (why wasn’t I simply contacted to remove the material? ), ultimately I understood the rules about such things.

The Deletion of Solicited Promotional Posts (They Ask Me to Support the Band): What was truly upsetting was the loss of material that was approved by the labels and the bands themselves. Since I do very few Unsolicited Promo pieces, this is the lion’s share of posts that are deleted. This is at the core of the problem: More than a dozen of these at last count – each requiring four hours or more apiece – were deleted out of my account and without warning.

Google chooses it’s bed and makes bloggers lay in It. Blogger/Google had the opportunity to choose its tactic when receiving notices. First of all, they could have delineated between longstanding reputable bloggers and those suspected to be leakers. They chose not to do this. Blogger/Google treats everybody the same (the good and the bad!) –They also could have chose the tactic to notify the bloggers of the demand and let us comply. They chose to not take this tactic either and simply delete the posts. Later, they altered this tactic slightly by going ahead and deleting the post and then, later, sent an email explaining their position. The end result is the same. To illustrate how utterly frustrating this is, I will outline what takes place start-to-finish: 

I’m a choosy blogger. Each month, I receive many, many albums – both in the mail and through digital. These are always accompanied by a press release asking to promote the band, their album project and tour. In the case when the bands/music labels/PR houses/publicists ask me to use a specific post when I publish the material then I comply. I use the material they request. 

All of these steps serve to make me an authorized agent for the label. [I fully understand that I do not own the material and need to pull it down immediately if ever asked. This is implicitly understood.]

CC:  Have you contacted Google about the issue, and if so, what kind of response did you receive?

RS: They never responded. An "opportunity" (in legalese, of course) offered a means to have the post restored – but like most bloggers, I didn’t have the knowledge or time to fight "city hall" on every post. Especially, since Blogger/Google didn’t even take five minutes to send a simple email response. Nothing professional, nothing courteous. Again, the tactic they choose belies their basic lack of respect for their users – which is why I took up the cause. They have a relative monopoly on blog hosting services and rule with an iron fist.

CC:  Are you concerned that your blog's reputation might be hurt when people click through to it from other sites, only to find that the content they're looking for has been removed? How has the removal of these posts impacted your blog's traffic?

RS: This is very hard to detect and prove. New people are coming in every day. But if you take a page out of economic studies, the value of "Opportunity Costs" are difficult to measure. If you are a first-time reader and you receive a dead link – you may never return.

CC:  Have you detected any loss in readership?

RS: Loyal readers were the ones to actually bring the deletions to my attention. I don’t think I could shake some of these people – they have truly become friends. But as with the prior example, some readers who have not been with the page long – predictably grow irritated at the absence of written material on the page when they repeatedly get dead links. And, they delete their bookmarks and go away.

CC:  Did you contact the RIAA? If so, what kind of response did you get from them?

RS: Actually, I firmly believe the majority of the posts weren’t pulled down on RIAA requests – the majority of these came through miscommunication at the label-level. The EU branch of the label doesn’t talk to the US labels. Sometime after the post goes live (with complete approval of the US label) the European branch contacts their legal department when they find the post promoting the band on my site. They choose to not recognize (or simply do not have visibility to the arrangement) and send an email to the IFPI (the British version of the RIAA). This group demands takedown from Blogger/Google.

I'd like to thank Ryan for taking the time to talk about this. Those interested in this story might also find Last.fm's story interesting.

Update: Blogger Product Manger has weighed in on the situation in the comments section.

Google Rumored to Be Eyeing Possible iTunes Competitor

Rumor has it that Google is eyeing Beverly Hills-based CatchMedia as another possibility in a string of acquisitions. CatchMedia is a company that is focused on creating a "Play Anywhere" system, which lets consumers use their music/media content collection and services wherever they want, regardless of the device they're using.

The rumor comes at a time when there is also much discussion about Apple possibly offering a cloud-based version of iTunes. Google could be looking at CatchMedia for efforts that would compete with this. Neither Google nor CatchMedia are offering comment on the situation, other than Google simply saying they don't comment on rumors or speculation.

But there is plenty of speculation, and it mostly deals with Google finding yet another way to compete with Apple, another topic that is being heavily discussed lately. Most recently, Google's acquisition of the reMail app has thrown some more wood on the fire, as it has taken away the app from Apple's App Store.

An iTunes competitor would be a much bigger deal, but again we're only in the rumors/speculation phase at this point. Still, CNET points out that in December Google reportedly tried to buy Lala, but was beaten by Apple. Suffice it to say, multiple signs point to Google looking to get deeper into music/media, and the company already has its own payment platform in Google Checkout. Google also has some tremendous opportunities to promote music and media purchases too with sites like YouTube and Google Product Search.

CatchMedia Founder Yaacov Ben-Yaacov has experience with selling start-ups to large corporations, having co-founded PictureVision, which was eventually bought by Kodak.

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