With paid music downloads falling far short of offsetting the impact of declining CD sales, next generation subscription services need to succeed if recorded music sales are ever going to come out of their nose dive.  There is certainly lots of supply side activity, with services launched or announced in the last year from, Nokia, Spotify, TDC, Sky, Virgin Media to name but a few. And the incumbents have been busy reworking their offerings (cf Napster’s new 50%-price-cut-with-MP3s play).

 

Music subscription services have a lot of history but not a huge amount of success, so what gives the current new crop any chance of survival, let alone success?  The key will be hiding some or more of the cost to the consumer and adding real value.  The bottom line is that many consumers are simply unwilling to pay for music and even fewer are interested in paying a monthly fee for it.  So success lies in making the services free or ‘feel like free’ to the end user, subsidizing the costs through savings to, or increased revenue from other core products.  TDC, the Danish telco, has pioneered this approach with its free-to-consumer service that is available only to its customers.  (A cynic might argue that Spotify is doing the same, subsidizing its free offering with VC funding!) 

 

TDC Play has enjoyed strong adoption (100 million downloads in 15 months, not bad for a country of just 5 million, and yes, that does translate to 20 tracks for every single Dane).  Crucially though, TDC reports that Play is delivering strong benefits to their core business, which in the end is what the service is all about.

 

But not everyone is having so much success giving music away to consumers (you’d think it would be a straightforward enough task right?).  Reports have  emerged that Nokia has acquired just 100,000 Comes With Music subscribers across 9 international territories, one year after UK launch.  I remain a firm believer in the Comes With Music business model and value proposition (free unlimited music on your phone and PC that you keep for ever, the entire cost hidden in the handset and tariff).  But there is not question that 100,000 subscribers after one year is nowhere near enough return for Nokia. Nokia needs to up its game, (and indeed is doing so) because if they don’t someone else will.

 

Mobile is becoming an increasingly important element of the next gen subscription services. Spotify are using mobility as they key driver for their paid offering and are even playing the subsidized game as well with a partnership with 3 in the UK.

 

There is no lack of service innovation, but there needs to be some consistency in the experimentation. For example, what value does Sky Songs deliver for 7.99 GBP for unlimited streams and some MP3s that Napster doesn’t for 5 GBP? 

 

Continued product innovation will of course be key to feels-like-free subscriptions becoming a success, but unless this is done within a consistent framework, consumers will remain largely disinterested except for the occasional service that gets its positioning right (e.g. TDC).  Whilst that would be good news for a few companies, it could be little short of catastrophic for the music industry.