Bradley Howard's Blog

Views of digital media, innovation, loyalty and business in the real world

Spotify Premium

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I had a new hard drive installed in my laptop this week and when I re-synced my iPhone I lost all my MP3s.

I don't understand how Apple can produce such a great phone, with great synchronisation with a number of computers, but be so damn awful with keeping my music catalogue together. That's my frustration over and done with.

I decided once and for all to upgrade/buy Spotify so that I can use it on my phone. I've used Spotify regularly on my laptop and home PC (I should enter an award for the most varied music styles in a single playlist) for ages and even before wiping my iPhone, it was frustrating only have a couple of dozen, old MP3s available on the phone.

In fact Spotify is so good that I'm considering changing our in car stereo to one that accepts a line-in (i.e. from the headphone socket in the iPhone) rather than an iPhone specific connection - to make it futureproof.

A major advantage of the iPhone app is that it downloads the music to your phone rather than streaming it - which means you can carry on listening without an Internet connection.

The one remaining issue in the house is that with the kids starting to get MP3 players of all shapes and sizes (and budgets), Spotify is only useful to my wife and I. The kids still require me to buy MP3s for their devices.

We think of music as ultra portable nowadays, but in reality, compared to records, tapes and CDs from the past, you can't swap music as easily as you used to, when music really was social!


 

Leaflet drop v AdSense

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A neighbour of mine is a videographer. They recently paid for a leaflet drop where they paid a company to put a paper leaflet through 2,500 local homes.

The cost of the leaflet drop was £77 (including VAT), and they had to pay for the design and printing themselves.

This type of advertising model is the absolute opposite of Internet advertising as follows.

Internet Advertising

  • Targeted on demographics, geography and keywords (i.e. what people are already looking for - either proactively in Google, or passively on Facebook)
  • Variable cost (Pay Per Click)

Leaflet drop

  • Untargeted (except for geography)
  • Fixed cost per 2,500 leaflets

Of course, these differences apply to sites such as Google or Facebook (which for a wedding videographer is a huge opportunity, where they can target a specific geography, timing, and be pretty smart about finding those newly-engaged couples).

The end result for the leaflet drop was even worse though, because they didn't receive a single lead. Not 'sale' or 'conversion' - but LEAD! Not one phone call! So that £77 plus printing cost was an expensive untargeted gamble which they won't be repeating again.


 

Spotify Freemium rebalance

Spotify

I see that Spotify is trying harder and harder to convince more subscribers to pay for the service, rather than rely on advertising income.

Tonight the new Brandon Flowers album is only available to Premium users. Spotify are [perhaps rightly so] preserving many of the advanced features and new content solely for their tenner a month subscribers.

If I worked at Spotify, I would try and poach experienced ad sales people from traditional radio stations such as Absolute or Global Radio (owners of Capital FM, Classic, XFM and others).

Clearly those stations have a ad sales business model which keeps them afloat. Those radio stations would love to have the CRM information that Spotify has at their disposal, which would further help traditional sales people.

As many people in media have been suggesting for a while, New Media companies have a lot to learn from traditional media companies - many of the business models are the same.


 

Why Is Old Media Being Perverse?

Why Is Old Media Being Perverse ?

 

I was going to use the term 'lemmings' but the United Order of Lemmings have written to me and asked me to stop giving them a bad name.

How did ITV get Friends Reunited and ITV Local so wrong ? And where did NewsCorp managed to get MySpace from 100m to 5m users - and why are they now seeming to do the same with The Times online sites?

Yet, with video they have leveraged this positions well and become dominant in the provision of online video in the US and the UK. In the US no major TV company has tried to stray beyond what they do, and at the same time they've come up with concepts such as Hulu.

Collaborative ventures like this have critical mass in the US, but seem futile in the UK where only the BBC count.

Traditional media has great sales capabilities, good production discipline, but the content is what counts.

Great video content is much more difficult to produce than a great article. Volume of video content is even more difficult. For example, by my experience, a minute of high quality video takes an hour to edit on average.

Likewise, audiences now form themselves and generate their own 'content'.

So why can't old media monetize this ? This, perhaps, is the most valuable question in media.

 

I just commented on an excellent article by Iolo Jones of VidZapper regarding Old/Traditional Media companies struggling to make New Media ventures successful. The article is above, and my comment was as follows:

Excellent article Iolo - I agree with every single point.

The BBC have successfully implemented Digital Media so, so well - i.e. iPlayer, the BBC News website (including each upgrade), even the BBC Weather site is excellent (albeit the accuracy can be dubious, that's not their fault though). 

There's no close second in the UK except maybe skysports.com - will the mothership demand that it also becomes paid-subscription?


 

Bradley Howard

Head of Digital Media at Endava, although all the views in this blog are purely mine and not necessarily those of Endava.

 

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