SONG CONTEST BLOG

MusicWeek reported that ad-supported music service and download store, We7, which Peter Gabriel co-founded, is rolling out a new monetization model whereby its users get rewarded with points for their session time which can be redeemed for ad-free days of music.  In addition, an ad-free subscription service will be offered as the portal’s premium tier.  The news comes just shy of SpiralFrog’s announcement last month that it will be shutting down.  SpiralFrog, a competing ad-supported music service, was unable to sustain its business model.

Spotify, the streaming music service, announced last Thursday that Paul Brown will take on the role as the company’s UK Managing Director on April 20th.  It appears as if Brown was headhunted from Pandora where he served as Managing Director International.  Formerly at Sony Music UK where he contributed to the company’s digital music expansion and currently a Non-Executive Director at artist funding site, Slicethepie, Brown is the ideal candidate to spearhead Spotify’s operations in the UK where the uptake to the service has been “phenomenal”, Spotify noted on their blog.

P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense.  The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.

Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources.  Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone.  However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns.  At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization. 

In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and  Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks.  All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.

On demand music streaming service, Spotify, has been on my radar since the company announced a distribution deal with CD Baby in the first week of February.  CD Baby, the leading force in independent music retail and digital music distribution, represents more than 175,000 artists which account for over one million tracks, all of which are now available through Spotify’s lightweight music streaming application.  This licensing deal marks the ‘long-tail’ trend in music availability and consumption, and celebrates the access independent artists have today to mass audiences through pioneering music services, many of which had treated indie talent as nothing more than an afterthought after securing major label catalogues.  Under the aphorism of “access not ownership”, the Luxemburg-based company has been growing exponentially since its €15.3m venture capital injection in October 2008 and, in turn, joining an elite group of legal music experience providers such as Pandora, Last.fm, TheSixtyOne, and others, which have found success in catering to music consumers through a balanced and worldly music library whilst reserving significant real-estate for up and coming artists: a pop-culture and grassroots music mix that appears to be paving the way for a new industry.  A spot in Spotify’s limelight is not yet available directly for small acts and labels but CD Baby has certainly lowered the barrier of entry.  Thank you Derek or, rather, Disc Makers for making this possible…

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