People who have paid the $10 per month are gonna feel they have been cheated! Spotify the controversial streaming service (in Thom Yorke’s world) is planning to deliver its free mobile version. Previously it was only free on your computer – if you could tolerate ads between songs – but, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Swedish service has decided to extend the service to your mobile device,… of course, with ads included!
And there is another twist to this new feature, the free service will offer you to stream a certain amount of songs on demand, but just a certain amount if you see what I mean – and they didn’t tell how many. For once it is not gonna be an all-you-can-listen-to kind of thing, but it ‘will mostly serve up music based on the user’s input, much like the custom radio services such as Pandora Media Inc’, still according to the WSJ. So if you still want to play exactly what you want for an unlimited amount of songs, stick to your $10 per month. Still this new service is a serious concurrence for Pandora and Rdio,… and so many others. Beats Music streaming service (Dr. Dre with Trent Reznor as chief creative officer on the project) will launch in January, and it is supposed to be oriented towards ‘a artist-curated playlists and suggestions’ platform, iTunes Radio was launched last September (but is currently only available in the US), and Google’s (pedantic name) ‘Play Music All Access’ has very recently extended its service in Germany. Only YouTube is behind, as it has announced that its streaming service would be delayed till next year, it’s still buffering I suppose. It’s kind of crazy, there are so many new streaming services that I have totally lost count, Wikipedia lists 37 of them (not sure it’s a complete list), and honestly, how many do we need? I guess internet selection will eventually kill most of them and the most adapted to the market will survive.
To go back to Spotify, the only revenue of the free service on mobile devices will come from ads, so expect a lot of them! This past week, Spotify explained how it pays the artists – Iman wrote about it here – basically demonstrating it wasn’t the source of the problem. But I certainly don’t see how the royalty rates could increase with this new free mobile service: the deal was made between big companies (Sony, Universal and Warner) and Spotify, and one more time, the artists weren’t directly involved. They will see their music freely distributed on every iPhone and iPad of the planet without being concerted. The new free Spotify mobile streaming service will launch on December 11th, just on time for Christmas.