Topic: Streaming
SoundCloud needs more money, or it may sell at a fire-sale price – Recode (Mar 11, 2017)
SoundCloud is beginning to look a lot like Twitter, another service which has lots of active users but which seems to be struggling to find a business model that can drive it toward profitability. In SoundCloud’s case, that has apparently meant it’s struggled to raise money over the past few months, and a possible acquisition by Spotify also seems to have fallen through. On paper, SoundCloud is in a hot area – music streaming – but of course even for the largest player in paid streaming (Spotify) it’s not yet profitable. Paid streaming has been great for the music labels, which have seen a turnaround in their fortunes over the last couple of years as a result of its growth, but not yet as good for the actual providers. SoundCloud is in an even worse position, being mostly a free provider, although it’s tried to turn up its paid services in the past year or so. I think the most likely outcome for SoundCloud at this point is an acquisition and absorption into something bigger, most likely Google.
via Recode
Spotify now has 50 million paid subscribers – The Verge (Mar 2, 2017)
Spotify keeps extending its lead as the leader of the paid streaming market, although it’s worth noting that not all those subscribers are created equal – see, for example, its recent partnership with the New York Times and many more and larger partnerships with mobile carriers. Those subscribers are all paying a lot less than the standard $10 per month rate Spotify charges standalone subscribers, and they likely make up an increasing proportion of the total. Still, it’s quite the achievement by Spotify to get to this milestone, especially its rate of growth over the past year or so. Next achievement to focus on: turning all that growth into profits, something that remains elusive.
via The Verge
Spotify is preparing to launch a Hi-Fi music tier – The Verge (Mar 1, 2017)
Another front in the challenging streaming music differentiation war: higher-fidelity music, something Tidal and some other niche services already offer but which the big players mostly haven’t. Spotify only appears to be testing this option with customers at the moment, including a range of different prices for the upgrade ($5-10), and there’s no guarantee it launches. Obviously, higher revenue per month could expand margins, but only if Spotify doesn’t have to pay commensurately more for the content itself. And of course the portion of users who would actually pay more per month is likely to be very small as a percentage of the total.
via The Verge
Spotify expands its push into original content with new podcasts – TechCrunch (Feb 23, 2017)
It’s becoming increasingly clear that original content is going to be an important part of differentiation in the streaming music space going forward, between Spotify’s earlier video content and now several new podcasts, and Apple’s focus on Beats 1 radio and its TV shows. The difference is, of course, that Spotify has a free tier, where this original content will also be available, while Apple will restrict its TV shows to paying subscribers. For Apple, the cost isn’t that big a deal – it has a much bigger company to fund such investment – but for Spotify such additional costs will push it yet further away from profitability without any big direct revenue benefit.
via TechCrunch
The Key to Pandora’s Subscription Hopes: Country Music – WSJ (Feb 21, 2017)
This is a fascinating angle on Pandora’s shift to becoming an all-you-can-eat subscription music provider next month: the idea that it’s uniquely appealing to country music fans and hopes to convert many of them to $10-a-month paying subscribers. The article presents lots of interesting evidence on every point but one: that country music fans aren’t already subscribing to other services – a point it finally concedes in the penultimate paragraph. It certainly is true that other streaming services have focused on other genres, principally pop and hip-hop, and that country music fans have been a neglected bunch. But if Pandora is staking its push here on winning over this group, I suspect it’ll have a tough time making a business out it – subscription music is a scale business, and Pandora’s appeal will have to be broad to be successful.
via WSJ
Amazon just shared new numbers that give a clue about how many Prime members it has – Business Insider (Feb 15, 2017)
I had missed this earlier in the week, but we got some juicy new numbers from Amazon as part of its 10-K filing, and they’re quite illuminating when it comes to Prime. This article specifically talks about Prime subscriber numbers, but the same underlying figures from the 10-K can also be used to derive some other interesting conclusions about Prime revenues and so on. I put together an in-depth blog post just now on all this, which you might want to check out too (my subscriber numbers are a little different from Morgan Stanley’s).
via Business Insider
Facebook Tries to Offer Music Labels a YouTube Alternative – Bloomberg (Feb 13, 2017)
Billboard reported at the end of December that Facebook was working on a Content ID-like system for policing music rights infringement on the site, and this Bloomberg piece suggests more of the same. There are several challenges here. Firstly, most Facebook video is published privately, so it’s impossible for outsiders to truly gauge the scale of infringing content. Secondly, a lot of the music videos shared on Facebook are covers, not originals, making detection tough. And third, though Facebook wants to set itself up as a more attractive alternative to YouTube, with advertising as its business model it’s unlikely to pay out at a much higher rate, and in fact may detract from the progress being made by paid streaming services in compensating artists more adequately by creating yet another massive source of free music listening. As such, I’m not convinced that the labels should jump too quickly into bed with Facebook. And that’s tough for Facebook because it clearly wants to take share from YouTube, but music is a huge component of the latter’s popularity.
via Bloomberg
Amazon, Apple, Google and Other Tech Companies on the Billboard Power 100 (Feb 9, 2017)
Billboard does an annual Power 100 ranking of the most important/influential execs in the music industry. Coming at this from a tech angle, there are several notable companies on the list: Spotify’s Daniel Ek takes the top spot, several Apple folks are at #4, Amazon at #12, iHeartMedia at #19, YouTube at #30, Pandora at #34, Facebook is at #54, and various others are scattered through the second 50. Amazon’s ranking is surprisingly high, but is entirely due to Billboard’s perception of Echo and Alexa’s role in transforming music, as illustrated by Billboard’s interview with Jeff Bezos and Amazon Music head Steve Boom. I think the take here is a little overblown, but there’s no doubt Echo and Alexa are changing the experience of music for the small minority of people who use them. YouTube’s relatively low ranking is surprising given how important a channel the site is for the music industry, but of course its relationship with the labels and artists is complicated. This kind of ranking exercise is always somewhat arbitrary, but it’s interesting to get a music industry take on the tech companies and their relative importance here.
via Billboard Bezos Interview (see also Power 100 rankings)
Music teams from YouTube and Google Play combine – The Verge (Feb 8, 2017)
It’s always been odd that Google has two separate music streaming apps rather than simply two on-ramps to a single streaming app, so it’s good to see it combining the teams behind them as at least a first step towards eventually having a single music experience too. Neither of Google’s apps ever shows up on industry charts of subscribers, so the numbers on both are likely small still, so this is a great time to make a change before foisting a lot of upheaval on a large base of customers. Note also the bizarre final paragraph in this piece, which somehow tries to tie Google’s move here into a narrative about apps in general falling out of favor with users.
via The Verge
New York Times Offers Free Spotify Service to Boost Subscribers – Bloomberg (Feb 8, 2017)
Spotify has long partnered with wireless carriers to boost subscription numbers with subsidized memberships, and it now looks like it’s going to do the same with the New York Times. The subscriptions are generally going to net Spotify quite a bit less than its standard US $10 per month rate (though it’s impossible to know how much), and that in turn devalues the paid subscriber numbers Spotify regularly releases. It’s the leader by paid subscriptions by some margin over Apple Music, but it’s quite possible that Apple Music could end up netting (and paying out) as much revenue as Spotify in the next year or two even with far fewer “paid” subscriptions because of this kind of discounting. And of course a discounted subscription likely means a lower margin for Spotify too, further complicating its efforts to try to turn a profit ahead of a possible IPO. Lastly, music and news are an interesting bundle, given that those are the two content categories for which Apple has launched its own app in the last couple of years.
via Bloomberg
Spotify may delay IPO to 2018 as it rethinks licensing deals – TechCrunch (Feb 2, 2017)
As I’ve argued for some time now, it doesn’t bode well that Spotify, despite being the largest paid streaming music service in the world, doesn’t seem to be able to turn a profit. A big part of the problem is that its relationships with labels dictate sharing a very high percentage of revenue with them, which leaves Spotify with very little margin to cover all its other costs. It sounds like Spotify is now considering postponing what was to have been a 2017 IPO by another year while it goes back to the labels to renegotiate those problematic deals. The TechCrunch piece linked here suggests than appetites for IPOs of companies without profits has diminished, but that isn’t really the problem here – Spotify’s real problem has been that there hasn’t been an obvious route to profitability even if all its current growth trends continue – unlike a SaaS business with no profits, there’s no obvious growth lever that turns things around eventually. It’s Spotify’s fundamental business model that’s the problem here, and absent renegotiated contracts with the labels it’s hard to see how that changes.
via TechCrunch
Verizon Lays Off Go90 Employees, Tasks Vessel Team With App Rebuild – Variety (Jan 23, 2017)
Verizon’s Go90 has never seemed like the right answer to the question of what a mobile carrier should do to make money from video (the right answer might either be launching a fully fledged video service a la DirecTV Now, or simply enabling all other video services a la BingeOn). These layoffs seem like validation of that sentiment, as it looks like Verizon is doing a bit of a reset on its Go90 efforts, putting former Vessel people in charge instead of the 155-strong team it’s had in San Jose for some time now, most of whom came from the Intel OnCue acquisition. Go90 has always been an odd mishmash of stuff, mostly freely available elsewhere with a few freemium elements focused on millennial-oriented content, but has never felt like a serious video play, and I still don’t expect it to turn into any kind of meaningful business for Verizon unless there’s a big pivot to a new strategy for the service.
via Verizon Lays Off Go90 Employees, Tasks Vessel Team With App Rebuild | Variety
Sprint Acquires 33 Percent of TIDAL and Creates Game-Changing Partnership – Sprint Newsroom (Jan 23, 2017)
The one thing missing from this Sprint/Tidal press release? Subscriber numbers for Tidal, which have been the source of recent controversy. As I said in commenting on that news, Tidal may have a tough time surviving if its subscriber numbers are as bad as they seem, and I’m guessing this Sprint investment is designed to stabilize things a bit. Partnerships between streaming services and wireless carriers are old hat – Spotify has lots of these in Europe, and they’ve helped its paid subscriber numbers enormously, while we’ve seen several others here in the US too. From a Sprint perspective, this can be seen as a response to T-Mobile’s Music Unlimited program, which offers free music streaming from every major music service, though Tidal is a much more niche approach, which means it’ll likely have limited benefit unless Sprint heavily subsidizes the service for its subscribers.
via Sprint Acquires 33 Percent of TIDAL and Creates Game-Changing Partnership | Sprint Newsroom
Jay Z Is Fraudulently Inflating Tidal Numbers, Report Says – Digital Music News (Jan 20, 2017)
Tidal has been one of the second tier music streaming services that often gets rolled up into the “Other” slice of streaming music subscriber number pie charts, but its reported numbers have been big enough in their own right to be broken out in some cases. There are only a handful or so of major music services around the world with more than a million paid subs, and Tidal is one of them, along with giants Spotify and Apple and fellow medium sized players Rhapsody/Napster and Deezer. But this report suggests Tidal has been exaggerating its actual subscriber numbers, which have always seemed surprisingly high, and that its real numbers are much closer to one million than the three million it has reported publicly. The reality is that Spotify and Apple between them dominate this market, with Spotify quite far ahead, and everyone else well behind Apple, which has also been growing rapidly. The other players have all struggled to find meaningful growth here, though the ad-supported streaming business is far more popular (though it also delivers far lower revenues to the industry). I wouldn’t be surprised if Tidal exits the market in the near future if this is the true state of its business.
via Jay Z Is Fraudulently Inflating Tidal Numbers, Report Says – Digital Music News
AT&T’s Streaming Service DirecTV Now Peaking At 35,000 Simultaneous Users – StreamingMediaBlog.com (Jan 20, 2017)
Update: AT&T has now released official numbers, with over 200k paying users. So it appears Dan’s estimates were a little short. Though given that AT&T offered a free Apple TV for those who committed to three months of service, it’s possible some of those users aren’t active and will churn shortly.
Dan’s very good at what he does, so I have no reason to doubt that he’s in the right ballpark here, and these numbers are interesting in their own right. What’s even more interesting is how poorly this service has performed, and how unapologetic AT&T has been about it. I met with Enrique Rodriguez, the CTO for AT&T’s Entertainment Group, at CES, and although he acknowledged there were issues, he downplayed them. I have had better luck than some with the service once the first few days were over, but many people are still clearly having lots of issues, which is just baffling for something AT&T talked up so much ahead of time. Moreover, the platform AT&T is using for DirecTV Now is the same one it plans to use for Sunday Ticket online, its TV Everywhere services, and more going forward. I’d hope things start to change quickly here, because the way things are going right now this doesn’t look pretty.
via AT&T’s Streaming Service DirecTV Now Peaking At 35,000 Simultaneous Users – StreamingMediaBlog.com
Pandora Reducing Workforce by 7% – Variety (Jan 12, 2017)
Pandora is one of the longest-standing music streaming services in the US, and yet it is perennially challenged to make a decent profit. Today, it announced it’s cutting 7% of its US workforce to refocus its business, though it hasn’t said which bits are being cut and which are now considered core. My guess is that this is a reflection of the imminent launch of its subscription all-you-can-eat service and perhaps a de-emphasis on its traditional radio-style business, but more clarity will likely emerge soon. This is just another indicator of just how tough it can be to make money in streaming music, despite the boon paid music subscriptions have been to the music labels in the last couple of years.
via Pandora Reducing Workforce by 7% | Variety
Dish unveils a 4K Android TV streaming box with Netflix, Sling TV, and local channels – The Verge (Jan 3, 2017)
Though cord-cutting is often seen as “breaking the bundle”, in reality many cord cutters end up creating their own stitched-together bundles of multiple streaming services, and in many cases an antenna for over the air content is part of the mix too. DISH’s Sling recognizes that, and this box combines the Sling service, Netflix, YouTube, and OTA channels into a single box running Android TV. That makes it a fairly compelling box – arguably more so than most of the other Android TV boxes out there.
via Dish unveils a 4K Android TV streaming box with Netflix, Sling TV, and local channels – The Verge
Music streaming hailed as industry’s saviour as labels enjoy profit surge | Technology | The Guardian (Dec 29, 2016)
The headline is right on here – streaming has been a boon for the music industry, arguably the second time the tech industry (and Apple in particular) has come to its rescue. But it doesn’t go far enough – it’s paid streaming that’s saving the industry, while the best that can be said for ad-supported streaming is that it provides a useful funnel for the services that really drive revenue. That tension between paid and free streaming and their respective economics is a key one to watch in the music industry over the next couple of years.
Netflix never slowed down in 2016 – Engadget (Dec 23, 2016)
This is a decent summary of Netflix in 2016 – a rapid international expansion coupled with a paring back of purchased content and a ramping up of original content, which is a pretty good summary of Netflix’s strategy at the moment too. The challenge continues to be finding growth domestically, where growth has slowed quite a bit, and driving profits overseas, where growth is strong but loss-making.
via Netflix never slowed down in 2016
Apple Music: Platform? Promoter? Both. – The New York Times (Dec 22, 2016)
Competition in the streaming music market is tough – everyone is offering roughly the same catalogs for roughly the same monthly price. So competition happens at the margins – in recommendations, user interfaces, and exclusive content, which is the subject of this interview with Apple Music execs.
via Apple Music: Platform? Promoter? Both. – The New York Times