Whinging about the music industry..... so I said that I'd stop that and concentrate on the positives. Before I do though the Guardian have gone into a bit more detail on exactly what artists get paid by Spotify, which is important, because Spotify wouldn't be streaming music if the record companies weren't getting paid, so somewhere along the line there's a lot of money not going the way of artists.
anyway, positives.... So MFlow is a social music discovery site. And a social music trading site. But one that the record industry approves of. As you can see from the screengrab it looks a lot like Spotify. Essentially the way it works is that you follow people if you share their taste, and they 'flow' tunes to you to listen to. And you can reflow stuff on to your followers. Or of course create your own flows. This all sounds very Twitterly familiar, but the smart stuff is in the trading bit. MFlow is all built into an interface similar to iTunes that allows one click purchase. 20% of the purchase price is passed on to whoever recommended the tune to you. Likewise you make 20% of the price of anything that your followers buy based on your recommendation. The follower/following dynamic is a little bit hit and miss so far, as you can't import your social graph from anywhere else so you have to do a bit of digging. MFlow is still in private beta though, and Facebook, Twitter and LastFM import functionality are coming soon.
I think this is a very smart system for a few reasons. Firstly rather than penalising fans for being fans, it makes discovery and payment part of one process - sharing music is incentivised. Secondly there is a weird thrill to see your first payment come through - it might only be £0.20 per song, but that is essentially someone handing over hard cash to YOU for YOUR great taste. And thirdly it socialises what what (bizarrely) a very solitary pastime. Music itself (creation of, listening to, talking about, organising life around) is extremely social, but the actual physical act of buying it (or downloading it, or borrowing your mate's hard drive full of it, or whatever) is highly solitary since the demise of the music shop. Services like Spotify (lowering the barriers to access to music) and LastFM (the best social discovery system that has been invented to date) get you only as far as hearing music, not buying it. MFlow makes buying music social.
I'd love to know how the payments are structured on the other side though - are musicians going to see any of the potential revenue? Or is their work only going to be licensed in future keep the unnovation-hungry record companies alive for another year?
I think Mflow launches next week some time, but if you want to try it before give me a shout
Or that's what this intro video suggests. According to TechCrunch this launches on the 2nd Dec in the US.
Mog appears to have all the social discovery and customisable radio bits of Last FM but with Spotify style streaming added in. All for $5 per month. I'm currently ok with a mix of iTunes, Spotify and Last FM, each covering the bits of 'listening to music' that they are individually good at. There's no mention of mobile yet, on the MOG site, but I reckon if there was an app for that then I'd pay for one service that can do everything.
(although the price is a clue that I might not be able to: Mog's opportunity is that Spotify STILL isn't live in the US. While this great for Mog, music industry hobbling of any sort of international streaming standards means that we probably won't see this in the UK for ages)
This has been coming for a while, but the first view of a Spotify mobile app was unveiled today at Google's I/O developer conference. And the venue should give us a strong clue that this ain't no iPhone kit. Oh no. Given the huge potential conflict with iTunes, that has yet to happen, and this is an Android development.
To be honest, I believe that Spotify has too much potential for Apple to ignore, and it may well be that the iPhone app is in development (actually it is strongly rumoured to be: the question is more about whether Apple will approve it). Given Apple's previous preference for exclusive deals of the O2/AT&T variety, I had a suspicion that Spotify would only be allowed onto the iPhone as an exclusive (and no doubt premium subscription/buy-through-iTunes revenue share deal) handset partner.
The Android version has clearly blown this out of the water, and if this app can stream and cache to a handheld with the stability and zero latency that the Spotify desktop app offers, then Apple will soon be playing catch-up. I know I am a confirmed lover of Spotify as much as I am an iTunes-sceptic, but I reckon this could be the relaunch that Android needs.
Not sure if I missed some hype about Spotify in 2008, but one of the benefits of having 2 weeks off doing anything is the chance to catch up. What I really wanted to do was catch up on lots of music I'd not got round to downloading over the year, but what I found was basically all the music you could want (well, nearly) completely free. I'd intended to check out loads of bands I'd only heard on the radio to see if there was more to them than singles (and whatever the iTunes lovers say, a quick blast isn't enough). Turns out I just need to log in to Spotify and put a playlist together.
Looks like this is ad-funded (although there are hardly any ads currently - I've heard two in two weeks - expect that it would need more ad inventory once it moves public to avoid a purely subscription model), and currently in private beta (only took me a few days to get an invite though - I've got a few more, so email/DM me if you want a go). There are subscriptions available, but I'd need a lot more annoying advertising to make me think about paying. Buffering is quick and smooth, and the app is very low impact, even on my most underpowered netbook. This suggests that it will be easy to port to mobile: should see an iPhone version imminently. The software itself has an iTunes feel to it, only without the clunkiness and latency that you get running iTunes on a Windows machine.
The real beauty of this system is that the major labels are already signed up - EMI, Warners, SonyBMG & Universal already buy into the business model. I reckon the mobile version could be this year's killer app - question is whether it will be a partnership with a mobile brand or network (in a ComesWithMusic sort of way), or whether they will release applications for the huge range of devices that are going to be open to 3rd party software this year. The quick win (if ad-funding starts to fail) would be the first option. The killer app would be the second.
