Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Spotify hope to get you to open your wallet

The hole in Spotify's business plans that was the discovery that the free service is so good nobody can be bothered to pay for the premium service. Now, they're trying to plug that hole and get people to hand over the cash:

The music streaming service hopes to convert its 1m users to a premium subscription by offering extras such as mobile and living-room access, higher quality streams, bundled downloads, recommendation, ticketing and social features

What's that you're offering? If I give you money, you'll offer me slightly higher quality streams to play through my tinny speakers? And the chance to buy tickets to events, thereby saving me the need to go to a different website and not pay a subscription fee before buying?

And recommendations? You want me to pay you some money, and in return, you'll suggest other tracks I might like? But right now, with your free service, I can ask my friends on Twitter or Facebook what I should listen to next, and find it on your free service, and then listen to it? Why do companies think that an admittedly useful quick crunch of subscriber tastes to suggest 'if you like this, you might like this' is adding so much value that people will pay for it? If there's one thing in greater, free supply online than music, it's opinions and suggestions.


1 comment:

Rob said...

And if you download Airfoil or something similar (for free, of course), you can stream direct to your wireless-enabled speakers and hey jingo free music that sounds perfectly fine without the need for a thicker stream.

I love Spotify, but all their attempts to monetise the business seem a bit hopeless, really. I even mentally blank out the ads now.

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