Sony dumps Omnifone; hooks up with Spotify

Sony is trying again to make 'paying to stream music through Playstations' a thing, killing off its long-running, long-stalled partnership with Omnifone (Music Unlimited, as you've probably forgotten) and is instead going to bake Spotify into the PSN.

The key difference - besides being a service that people have actually heard of - is that Spotify Free will be part of the deal, too; theoretically, Playstation users might get used to using their devices for streaming music via the free tier and decide it's a good enough experience to shell out to kill the adverts.

In addition, Spotify accounts created elsewhere will be accessible through Playstations.

It's an offering that could well see a shift in where people listen; it's not clear yet that it's going to mean a massive payday for Sony.

Murdoch makes the music man

BSkyB is poised to launch a on-demand music service that won't just be tied to its broadband or satellite customers. The pledges sound good - no DRM, download and keep all you want - but there's no actual detail in these early reports which confirms that, nor the all-important price point.

Omnifone (and, seriously, who would name their company to make it sound like it actually is an evil entity?) are going to do the behind-the-scenes work:

Omnifone already has deals with the major music labels and has the European rights to a catalogue of about 5m tracks. Its new service, called MusicStation Next Generation, allows ISPs to provide those tracks to their customers under their own brand names. The service can pipe music through set-top boxes as well as PCs and Mac computers

"Tens of millions of European consumers are engaged in music piracy every day." said Omnifone chief executive Rob Lewis. "Whilst government pressure is growing, we also need to deliver alternatives. With today's announcement, Omnifone is offering consumers something better than piracy."

Hmm. Is it "better than piracy"? Because if I want to hear Kid Creole's Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy, I can pirate that right now, for free; whereas with "today's announcement" I could wait until an unnamed date sometime in "Spring", and pay an unknown amount, to get the track in an as-yet-unconfirmed format. I'm not quite seeing the "better".

Download later

Today have just run a piece on the launch of Nokia's 'comes with music' handset, out of which nobody came out with much honour, to be honest.

A representative of MySpace UK showed off the MySpace music service, burbling about how it turns MySpace into your music hub on the web or something similar - before Rory Clellan-Jones pointed out that it's not if you live in the UK.

Some fans of The Script were given a chance to explain their justifications for not paying for music, which they delivered with the tone of people who had read something on the internet rather than like it was something they believe - "oh, yeah, I see music as pretty much a marketing tool these days" (do you really? But what about the vast majority of songs that don't get used as marketing tools? Is it okay to not pay for a Damon and Naomi song simply because a Kula Shaker song appears in an advert for apple sauce?); "I think the days of paying for music are over, I'm afraid" (what about the billions of tracks getting paid for through iTunes? Or the racks of CDs in HMV?).

Then they actually spoke to a member of The Script - I couldn't work out why they'd been playing a cover version of a Keane song under the piece, but it turned out that it was them. Script man claimed that he was cool with downloading because "if someone downloads your song, they'll tell 10,000 other people" - which seems to be wrong; downloading makes it more likely that people will sample a song than they would otherwise, but surely it's the people who care about your music enough to spring a little bit of cash for it are more likely to turn into your ad hoc promotion force than those who are merely downloading it on the off-chance?

Finally, a bloke from Omnifone, the company which powers the Sony-Ericcson version of Comes With Music, trumpeted that the way to get people to pay for music is to arrange things so "they don't know they're paying for it". Isn't taking money from people for something that they don't realise they're paying for at the more fraudulent end of unethical?

The whole piece seemed to have been constructed from people who had a shaky grasp on the subjects they were discussing, or, at best, hadn't really thought through what they were saying.