MusicKnow

Bloom.fm has recently lost their main investor TNT Media Investments Limited, a Russian TV network based in West London. The CEO Oleg Fomenko mentions that:

“Underlying this decision is economics – there is no business case at the moment in licensed digital music – margins are too low and up-front and growth costs are too high. The solution is a massive scale that then will allow for re-distribution of margins in the value chain.” 

  It was also stated that difficulties in paying royalties to music rights holders was a major contributor in the dropping of investment. A factor I believe could be the downfall of many music streaming companies in the future due to the vast amount of money required to purchase enormous catalogues of music for the services compared to the relatively small amount made from users paying for their higher tiered services.

  ‘Bloom.fm chief executive Oleg Fomenko said that the main reason for TNT pulling out now is "organisation change on the side of our investors", but also cited the difficulties of balancing the books with Bloom.fm's royalty payouts to music rightsholders.’

  The streaming service was very similar to Spotify as it allowed both mobile and desktop use and multiple payment levels. It had 4 different tiers to choose from including bloom zero, their free service that included radio and a discovery services that provided recommendations for users. Bloom 20, which was £1.49 a month and removed the advertisements from the service and added a playlist feature with the option to ‘borrow’ up to 20 songs. Bloom 200, similar to bloom 20 but with the option to download 200 tracks and finally full bloom, which gave users access to an unlimited catalogue of music for £13.99 a month, a fair amount higher than Spotify charging £9.99 for their premium service.

  This was a very unfortunate surprise for the company. Since their launch in 2013, they reached over a million users in a very short amount of time.

In my opinion, I believe that bloom.fm should’ve kept their pricing tiers a lot simpler for their users. Spotify, currently the most successful paid streaming platform in the UK, now only offer a free service and a premium service to their user base. I believe the reason behind the success of Spotify in comparison to bloom.fm is primarily that they had a stronger foundation in terms of their consumers. This gave the company a user-base that was loyal in using their services by continually evolving their user base, initially with free invitations to the service and changing the pricing tiers over time to suit the needs of their consumers. Spotify also eventually integrated Facebook into their service, which grew their user base significantly, something which bloom.fm didn’t have.

  Finally, with the growing amount of music streaming companies out there at the moment, there is great competition amongst the services and a struggle to strive as the best. Bloom.fm are still a relatively young company and are now looking for new investors, CEO Oleg Fomenko states:

Neil Young has made headlines today with the third most successful Kickstarter of all time, raising $6.22m for his new high quality Pono music player.

Neil Young has recently introduced a new high quality music player; the Pono player is an MP3 player with a difference, able to play songs at lossless formats, allowing listeners to hear music in extremely high detail. The company state that the player will allow users to listen to music exactly how it was initially produced in the studio.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in March, Young said he was not surprised by people's reactions to Pono. "It's been pretty predictable, because I'm a musician and I know how musicians feel about sound," he said. "The record companies made some bad choices and did not realize how big this tech [MP3s] was going to be. And when that happened, there was no alternative to the cheap sound. . . We're going to be able to play records back just like the artists made them — with absolutely no magic sauce, no DRM, no encoding, decoding, none of the things that screw with the sound and make it an intellectual property."

The MP3 player’s production was funded by the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. It is the third most funded project on the website, reaching $6.2 in contributions to mass produce the product, receiving over 18,000 backers, exceeding the goal it originally had of $800,000. Evidently, there are many people who feel this standard of listening is necessary in comparison to our current age of music streaming through Wi-fi and 3/4G connections. Although music streaming is growing at an incredible rate, it’s clear that there is still a need for people to listen at a higher quality, even if it’s not as convenient as a service such as Spotify.

The player even has its own music store, PonoMusic which provides customers with access to music of the highest quality that can be listened to at it’s highest potential on the player. The way to upload music onto the player however is not as quick as services such as iTunes and Spotify, where consumers can instantly download and listen music to their devices without necessarily using any cables, like the Pono player.

Kickstarter provided some appealing incentives to both smaller and high contributors. These included a mention on the Pono music website with a $5 pledge, to VIP dinner and a listening party with Neil Young himself, including an Artist Signature Series PonoPlayer and an overnight stay at a Chicago hotel to pledgers of $5000 or more.

‘PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio.’

It allows listening to formats such as:

CD lossless quality recordings (44.1 kHz/16 bit): About 5000 tracks. 

High-resolution recordings (48 kHz/24 bit): About 3200 tracks. 

Higher-resolution recordings (96 kHz/24 bit): About 1600 tracks. 

Ultra-high resolution recordings (192 kHz/24 bit): About 800 tracks.

In order to store thousands of large files, the Pono player encloses 64GB of internal memory and an additional removable 64GB of data with the use of a microSD card which is included with the product, an impressive 128GB of space in total.

It’s been announced that Apple are planning to integrate the music identification application Shazam into their company. Although it’s said these may be rumours, Bloomberg have recently reported this to be true.

Shazam is a mobile application that can recognise music that’s being played from various sources in order for users to identify a particular song that is being played.

It then provides users the option to engage further with artist’ by purchasing the identified song through iTunes, links the users to YouTube uploads, share the music through social networking sites and read more about the artist’ and their discography through the software. The company also boast an auto-recognition feature which allows it’s users to identify songs whilst running in the background of their mobile device, which then creates a list of music that the user has been surrounded by throughout the day.

It’s a fast growing company that ‘has monetised its 90 million users by offering them a chance to download the song they have just identified from iTunes, taking a small cut from Apple.’ Demonstrating the power and vast amount of data it now has in the recorded music industry. I believe this shows that Apple recognise the value of Shazam’s access to listening data and are aware of how significant this data is for sales.

  According to sources from Bloomberg, the incorporation of this software will be introduced in the next update of Apple’s iOS 8. Whether or not the auto-recognition feature will be incorporated is still in question, although the software update is said to feature an integration with Siri; allowing users to ask a question such as ‘what song is playing,’ to quickly identify music.

  ‘The song-identification feature will be integrated into the mobile software in the same way that Twitter Inc. (TWTR)’s service is currently incorporated, meaning consumers don’t need to separately download it.’

I think this integration from Apple will help to significantly increase the declining sales not only from iTunes, but heavily boost streaming service plays, as the iOS involvement will result in millions of iPhone users the option to purchase and stream any song they hear in their environment on a daily basis. I also believe that with the growth of Shazam, the value and significance of music in advertising and TV shows will increase for publishers and writers, as users are encourages to ‘Shazam an ad’.

Online gaming giants Steam are to be introducing their own platform of music streaming called ‘Steam Music’.

Steam is quite similar to the music store iTunes in the way users can download products through their online marketplace and are then stored in the cloud to be accessed on different computers. Steam also allows users to retain their in-game data whilst using different computers to play on. In addition to this, from each game download, Steam also take a small percentage (30%) of the purchase, similarly to iTunes.

Steam, having over 65 million accounts makes them a very valuable asset for music streaming and as it happens, they may be pairing up with one of the biggest streaming platforms at the moment, Spotify.

Steam now has more than 65 million active accounts. The figure marks a 30 percent rise in players over the last year. The video game digital-download platform also boasts daily peak concurrent users of more than 6 million.

This is not only a huge growth in numbers but they also have millions of users online at any given time.

With music streaming in the UK at the moment accounting for £77 million of recorded music revenues, Steam have spotted a great opportunity for the potential growth of their company that will also be highly beneficial towards the recorded music industry; boasting 41 million more users than Spotify alone.

I would imagine that if even a small percentage of these users jumped on this feature, it would significantly benefit Spotify and the music industry as another massive income stream for music rightsholders and artists.

The gaming company is rapidly growing and have also just overtaken Xbox live account numbers of around 17 million active users. I think the simultaneous pairing of their own streaming product would help in getting ahead of the gaming competition as both Xbox and Sony have their own specific music platforms.

Although the Spotify integration is not for certain yet, there are a few signs that may show some truth to this.

"Valve has already done quite a bit of work on Spotify integration in the Steam client, and appear to be using... Spotify's official API for [placing] Spotify functionality into third party applications."

Steam appear to have been trialling this idea for some time, but have yet to fully confirm the Spotify integration.

George Ergatoudis, from Radio 1 has announced one of the biggest changes in the history of the UK charts that it is to be including streaming data and views into the charts.

This will be including services such as Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Shazam and potentially YouTube and Vevo (As well as other streaming services) in the near future.

The aim of this change is to show a truer representation of the UK's most popular songs, however it's being argued that including data of free plays and views with paid music may not necessarily present an accurate portrayal in the charts. However certain rules will be in place in order to make the new system as fair as possible such as, reducing the value streams have in this instance by making them “weighted” in comparison to an iTunes download for example.

It also seems the UK Charts will be initially cautious to include YouTube and Vevo views. Something I personally agree with doing, due to the nature of some of the most popular music videos on these platforms; a song may not necessarily be popular directly due to the content of the music but of the video. Also with the ability to purchase YouTube views and multiple versions of the same songs, bootlegs, remixes, this is something to be careful of.

David Joseph, the CEO of Universal Music, said the “UK charts risked becoming irrelevant if they didn’t incorporate streaming soon.”

This seems like a move the industry had to make sooner or later as streaming has been rapidly increasing in popularity. With Spotify users streaming millions of plays every year, in my opinion, the figures are definitely of significance to the UK charts as they are becoming just as if not more important than single purchases. I think this change may also directly affect the music we see in the charts, how many artists begin to publish their music with streaming services and will give streaming services a lot more power in the industry to promote and market artists to the top of the charts.

Last year 183 million singles were bought in the UK, a fall of 3.4%. But streaming doubled in popularity, with UK fans listening to an estimated 7.4 billion tracks from advertiser-funded or subscription services.

Finally, the last year has seen Google launch a streaming music service while Apple launched iTunes Radio. It still faces competition from startups like Rdio, Slacker, and Deezer. And new music streaming services from Beats and YouTube are slated for next year, making music a crowded market. Spotify can’t risk going into the new year without a free mobile option.

Yet another streaming service is to be launched in the US for January!

Beats Music is supposedly a service with a difference.

Ian Rodgers, CEO mentions offering a service that is highly personal for it's users, focusing mainly on personal playlists.

“We’re going to focus really heavily on playlists, because that’s how we consume music and that’s how most people consume music.”

Rodgers' makes a point that the new service "wont be pumping out details of every track users play to Facebook." (Much like Spotify.) I'm happy to hear that this new service has taken this into consideration; on a personal note, I make sure all my guilty pleasure playlists aren't announced publicly for all my Facebook friends to see!

“This feature was always a bad idea. It’s as if Instagram uploaded every photo you take with your phone,” he writes. “I can’t wait for music services to stop doing this by default. I promise you Beats Music will not do the ‘barf everything you play on Facebook’ bullshit. If your music service is currently barfing every track you play to Facebook, turn that shit off.”

Like with any other streaming service, there will be heavy competition from the leading services out there at the moment. Beats Music seem confident that they can provide a service without the annoying, over the top data sharing of other platforms and provide a highly personal listening experience for their users.

Maybe I'm a bit late with this one, but I've just discovered that Google have announced a new streaming platform called 'Music Pass'. (I don't live under a rock, I promise.) 

The service has already showed plans to be in strong competition with streaming giant, Spotify.

Many of Music Pass' primary features seem to mimic Spotify's, such as desktop and mobile interfaces, both premium and free subscriptions options (same fee as Spotify) and offline play, also including 'background listening' as a diverse feature.

The main thing I immediately questioned when I heard about this service was, why would users choose a paid service over others or even a free one? I think the unique benefits will be that it will much more compatible amongst Google's own current and future products and services, including 'Google Glass' and Android devices. They also plan to include music video streaming with a much more user-friendly interface and to provide much higher quality audio than regular YouTube videos.

And from Google's point of view, I believe that they have foreseen the changes in the digital industry, seeing how largely streaming has contributed to the industry. Earlier this year the RIAA announced "the integration of streams to it's historic Gold & Platinum (G&P) Program." Music streams are now recognised to a greater extent and Google are taking great advantage of this.

By creating this additional service to the already massive YouTube, it will most likely increase their user-base even further, potentially reaching additional audiences that are already using other streaming services.

Not long ago I wrote about future re-launch of the HMV stores in the UK. Well the time has finally come and it looks like the initial opening and rebranding has so far been a success. With HMV adding many new features to their brand, it looks like they will have a fighting chance against their competition within the industry and may even be able to improve the current state of it.

HMV haven't failed to deliver their intention of bringing back store appearances and signings. Having recently re-opened their Oxford Street store on the 18th of October, the opening featured The Beatles's icon, Paul McCartney, with hundreds of screaming fans who waited for two days to meet and get his latest album "New" signed. 

The Beatles icon chatted patiently with each fan, signing for a total of 50 minutes. He told NME on Thursday that he was looking forward to his appearance as a chance to meet "real fans" rather than professional autograph collectors, who he dubbed "bounty hunters". - NME

This was a fantastic chance for fans to meet the pop legend and a great opportunity for HMV to get consumers excited about the company again. However it doesn't stop there; HMV have many plans that will completely change the way in which they are seen to the music consumer.

HMV have launched a new mobile app available on both Android and iOS where users can search for their music via image and sound search technology and can then continue to purchase their music via their smartphone. 

Integrating a ‘listening post’ Image Search feature will enhance the shopping experience as music fans scan and sample albums in store over our newly-fitted high speed wifi before deciding to buy either the physical or digital product direct from HMV. - Hilco News

The new application has generated an immediate boom within the mobile market, causing a stir from Apple who've "politely" asked HMV to remove the app from their AppStore. Could Apple be worried about the competition they may be facing? HMV are now the second mobile company (in addition to Apple) to provide pre-ordering to the market which also puts them ahead of the market.

Although Apple dominate mobile music downloads, I'm sure they recognise the importance of the mobile market and how any kind of competition will and can be a threat to their own sales.

The HMV app provides a difference in their service compared to Apples' with innovative features such as image and sound search. Not forgetting the physical stores that HMV have behind them, which many can argue make them a stronger match for Apple's music service because of the ability of "tying together the high street retail experience with digital music." Something which I think is a crucial part of HMV's re-branding in order to stay on top of their competitors.

HMV say this is only the beginning however, and still have plenty more plans for the future, such as providing streaming services, putting a larger focus on singles and will begin to introduce their famous gaming and vision market.

Cupertino demanding changes to #hmvapp despite formal approval on 15th Sept. - #hmvapp now at 10k downloads and growing FAST!! Still on iOS

There has been an endless discussion of Miley Cyrus online; whilst most things seemed to be in a negative light, there have been a couple of videos that have reduced the cringe factor when I see her name everywhere on the internet...

The first being her performance on Jimmy Fallon with the legendary band, The Roots. For those unfamiliar with The Roots, they are the live house band on the Jimmy Fallon Show, who perform with many of the artists that appear on the programme. The Roots contain, in my opinion one of the most respected drummers in the industry, QuestLove. The purely acapella performance of 'We Can't Stop' from The Roots as a whole is quite impressive and sure makes a change from Miley's usual antics!

I've been hooked on this remix of Rihanna's 'Pour It Up', there are a lot of trap producers arising now, but from what I've heard so far, RL Grimes is most definitely on top of the game.

Check out his SoundCloud here.

Another artist I've been listening to is Shakka. Probably most recognised from the song 'Blackout' by Wretch 32 which he features on; this is one of my favourite tracks of his.

The live performance (above) has definitely furthered my respect for the artist, he's an artist that can deliver a musical, dynamic and entertaining performance without sacrificing any vocal talent.

Also check out his Soundcloud for more tracks from his new EP 'Tribe'.