Spotify – another business model on the hoof?
I was very interested to read the recent Guardian coverage of the music streaming service Spotify, especially having been part of the beta programme and written about Spotify quite a while ago and a couple of times since.
My initial impressions were very positive. I liked the clean interface and the incredibly quick response times. But on using the service more, I started to notice that there seemed to be issues with the sound quality, and whereas I recanted to an extent, it does seem that others have picked up on this. And then there’s the adverts, which I do feel intrude on the music. I’ve been told this is why the service is free, but Last.FM and Musicovery are free and they don’t interrupt your listening pleasure with ads, that I’m aware.
But the real problem with Spotify seems to have been its licensing situation. It would appear that overnight, thousands of titles were recently removed on orders from the publishers. It’s even been noted that a lot of Radiohead is missing, which I find very peculiar considering they’ve been quite literally giving their music away.
So, the service is launched, then radically changed. Sounds horribly familiar to me. Isn’t this what happened with Pandora, which was my previous service of choice? Lovely interface, nice algorithm, then suddenly the plug is pulled for anyone outside the US. And only this week we have Facebook attempting to hold the rights to users’ content – forever – then deciding it needs to think about it some more, in a manner reminiscent of its recanting of the Beacon advertising system.
What is going on? Exactly how thoroughly have these services really thought about their business models before going to market? I would like to think Facebook in particular would have thought long and hard about the legal complexities of what they want to achieve. At the very least they should know that the very networks they enable have collective voices powerful enough to give them real problems. But it seems Pandora and Spotify have also gone like a bull at a gate to get their services online, then suddenly realised they haven’t quite thought it through.
Is it the mentality of the ‘permanent beta’, the idea that software is in constant development when delivered over the web? If so, it’s a powerful way to deliver software, but I’m not sure it’s such a good way to run a business.
Virgin Media is about to activate its social media
If you want to know what people are saying about you, you must listen.
Parts of Virgin Media are already doing this, and the company plans to do more of the same.
The bad…
The backstory: given that I’d been trying for two months to get broadband since my house move, I recently posted a non-too-complimentary missive about both Virgin Media and BT.
Virgin Media had been my ISP for three years and yet they seemed incapable of connecting me. Eventually they told me there was a ‘tag’ on the line – whatever that is – and that, if someone had checked this from the outset, I could have had a lot less bother. It turned out that the problem was really with BT.
So I left Virgin Media (from now on VM for the sake of my fingers), and decided to pursue BT. This was the second circle of hell, and six weeks later, I’m finally online.
… the good…
At the time of posting I decided not to turn it into just another whinge. I thought it would be interesting to pack it with keywords and links that should have made it as easy as possible for these suppliers to find me, especially given that this post would end up on my Twitter feed and Friendfeed, erm, feed.
Sally Whittle picked up on this, so it seemed fair to expect others to. I thought it would be an interesting social media experiment. I thought, “Let’s see whether those companies are actually on the lookout for posts about themselves. Potential consumers will be out there looking for reviews of ISP performance, so I wonder whether ISPs themselves are looking out for, well, reviews of their own performance.”
And VM found me – three times*. I was approached by Alex Brown and Paula Wills with an offer of help, and they put me in touch with Asam Ahmad, who is involved with VM’s online PR (note: I haven’t included Twitter links here for the reasons you’ll see below)
… and the coffee
So, Friday before last, I met up with Asam to talk about social media monitoring.
As with the Friendly Chat interviews I conducted last year, this took the form of a fairly open-ended conversation – no ‘ambush’ interviews, no recordings, just me furiously scribbling on a notepad in longhand while trying to concentrate on what was said and avoiding spilling my coffee. And this is what we talked about…
Turns out that, later that day in fact, VM was to receive the results of a major report on potential areas of social media activity. Conducted by an external agency, this looked at all aspects of social media, across all platforms, including VM’s competition. 360 degree reviews are commonplace in PR, and this sounded pretty comprehensive to me.
Obviously Asam couldn’t share the findings with me – he didn’t know them himself! – but he was able to tell me how this came about.
Activists activate
It seems that VM already has ‘activists’ who are already clued up, and already on Twitter, with alerts set up across various platforms to pop up when a mention of its name comes up. This is probably how Alex and Paula found me in the first place – and kind of what I was hoping would happen when I posted. Moreover, they had the foresight to put me in touch with Asam.
Activists is a good name. Companies need activists to forge change – and how things are changing.
These VM activists are already improving their internal comms. Asam has already found that, within a company of thousands of employees, he’s finding it really useful simply to follow colleagues and get an idea of what they’re up to. Informality is key. You can have any number of ‘awareness days’ or ‘focus groups’ but a company’s ability to create horizontal, small-world networks across its organisation could yield immensely powerful forces for positive change.
This very much reflects the findings of the recent AT&T Enterprise 2.0 study (disclosure: I worked on the report while at Fleishman-Hillard) which also found that employees felt they were benefitting from internal networks.
This is important. The next generation of employees will already be using these networks and will expect to be able to use them in their work – as, equally importantly, will their clients. In my first ‘real’ job I was surprised to have access to email: now, I expect it to be there (who doesn’t?), and it’s a tool I use every day. Facebook, Twitter et al will be equally as important, and more powerful, in the future.
From Virgin Media to social media
So VM already has a loosely affiliated group of activists. It’s now figuring out how it can use social media strategically. This involves asking critical questions such as:
- Where does social media sit? This is crucial. There is a very real risk that, as VM people continue to use social media, they may inadvertently become an ad-hoc frontline for customer support. While this is an area VM are keen to explore, Asam quoted a wonderful example of the MD of NTL:Telewest business using a twitter contact to pass a sales query on to the appropriate internal contact. While it’s great that the MD was able to do that, we’re talking seriously re-wired flows of communication here and obviously this is not a sustainable position.
- This leads to the next question: how is it resourced? At the moment, Virgin Media’s social media presence is growing organically – their activists are looking at the best ways to use the tools at hand and much of it is done in their spare time. However, if they go out with a big bang, there is a risk that everyone will start to expect immediate service from something that’s in its early stages, and only managed by a handful of VM’s activists. This is why I haven’t listed any Twitter links here. I don’t want these people to become inundated. Yet. Clearly they will need to have internal lines of comms set up that enable the team to pass issues on for quick resolution, and that resource needs to be justified.
- And justification depends on measurement, in which case, how do you measure success? I see this as A Big Question for social media in the coming year. How do you quantify your social media efforts? As budgets become ever more tightly squeezed, those owning the purse-strings will quite rightly demand to know what the returns are, given the inputs and the risks.
This is actually an age-old PR question: how to place value on relationships. My take on this is that, in meeting Asam and exchanged a few tweets with Alex and Paula, I now think of VM as a group of people rather than a corporate brand. Furthermore, VM has secured a ‘good’ story alongside a bad one, a point very astutely recognised by Rob at It’s Open.
There are other benefits. Asam himself follows journalists and they, in turn, follow him. Not only does he find it useful to get to know them on a daily basis – as he does with his colleagues – but he has insight into what opportunities the journalists are looking for and, in best PR practice, match what he has to offer with what they want. Furthermore they get to see, through following him, how he interacts with customers. It’s open and it’s transparent, and whereas these are just catch-phrases for social media, they’re good.
This is signal, not noise. I interviewed Sally Whittle, a very social media-friendly journalist, last year, and she testified to the drowning of journalists in the ever-increasing noise of social media. It’s true that journalists tend to be hunting for news, given their brief. But what’s wrong with a bit of fishing too?
At the end of the day, the Virgin Media activists found me. What needs to happen is for more of the company to become ‘activated’ too, but in a structured, planned, strategic fashion. The critical questions are around which parts of the company become activated, and how they interact with the rest of it. Virgin Media, to their credit, are addressing this problem now.
And at the end of the day, they found me. BT did not.
* Postscript: To date, BT still haven’t found me. Or, if they have, they haven’t contacted me. I should add that I’m now with BT quite simply because I’m so well acquainted with their support systems and I have a couple of named contacts, so I figure that if anything goes wrong (again), I can schmergle my way through the system and get help. Still, everything seems to be working. I’m listening to some cool Cuban music streamed through Spotify courtesy of BT. Nice.
Home 2.0 – the results are in
I wrote a while ago about about a personal project of mine: to integrate pretty much every audio and video source in my home that I could. My take on it was that if Web 2.0 represents integration, then so should my home. I called it Home 2.0.
Fortunately the media companies are satisfying this need. I wonder if comms companies are?
In theory
The system is based on an idea I had many years ago: that if, given broadcast was using digital in its production, I should be able to receive it digitally and therefore manipulate it, within parameters, to my own personal preferences.
At the time, it was virtually impossible. Broadcast was analogue and even if I could convert it, Bluetooth was conceptual and wireless was most definititely not mainstream so I couldn’t hook things up readily anyway. Digital TV, and the flexibility it offered, didn’t exist. But I knew it could be done.
Now, I have wireless. Broadcast is digital. Content can be shared, easily. The hardware is cheap.
In practice
So, what have I done? Well, my old self-built Win2K machine has Internet access. This is no longer by USB modem: it uses ethernet. Nothing new there. What this is plugged into, however, is a 802.11n Belkin wireless router. I have acquired another machine, an HP Pentium 4 desktop, and plugged stuff into it: namely, a Belkin N1 adaptor; a Creative Soundblaster audio card; a GeForce graphics card; a 750GB USB hard drive; and a wireless keyboard. It works. I can stream video without a hitch, with plenty of bandwidth left over potentially for HD video.
So, why am I telling you this?
Firstly because I’m slightly geeky (see right). Secondly because some people expressed interest in the outcome when I first posted about this. But also because I think my personal example illustrates two trends.
Given that I’ve finally managed to do something I thought about years ago, I make two more predictions for the coming years:
1. One day, I will have a small black box. This will fit on my keyfob. It will detect every input/output device on any room I walk into, and detect them. In turn, they will detect it. I will immediately be able to listen to or watch any content I want to – including web – instantly and easily. I just have to see what’s available.
2. Eventually, music and film companies will put up prices online for buying audio and video, very much like bidders do on financial markets today (exactly like it, in fact). You will be able to choose the best price for what you want, and buy. Simple. But it could go even deeper than that: instead of buying the entire track or film, it could be supplied in chunks – like BitTorrent, say – each of a certain time, each chunk of which is also bid on. So, your software could, while you’re watching the film or listening to the music, surf in the background continually looking for the best bidder for what you want to watch or listen to, and if it finds something cheaper, it buys it in, and seamlessly connects it to your stream. It’s exactly like a market, in which you buy at the best price.
I’ve done my bit. Every input/output device I have now links to every digital device. Wherever I want it, I can listen to or watch pretty much what I want to. Musicovery gives me broadly what I like. Last FM gives me broadly what other people like me, like. Spotify might well bridge the divide between the two.
Media is doing its bit. The trend for personalisation of content looks set to continue, especially with new services such as BBC iPlayer and Channel 4oD.
But are corporate comms companies doing their bit? How do we include messages in content that, as people become more sophisticated in their preferences and attitudes, may prefer to – and have power to – exclude?
The simple answer is: make them relevant. Every succesful comms company has done this. It’s just done it in a broad way for such a long time. It now has to start becoming more granular – more specifically relevant.
And how can it do this? Through feedback. Through exactly the same dynamics that enable people like me to receive the content I want. Each and every company, no matter what its market, whether media, finance, healthcare or tech, is going to have to start breaking its brand down into tiny little chunks that are consumable by that specific audience.
Social media now enables this to happen. If people find something relevant – whether that means useful, interesting, cool – they talk about and share it. All we need to do is make our clients appeal in the right way to the right audience, and off you go.
See? It’s easy. Honestly.
No more delays, let’s Spotify
It’s been quite some time since I posted regularly. This has been for two reasons: I broke my PC; and I’ve been trying to figure out how to differentiate between what I post here, and on the PNeo blog.
I didn’t actually break my PC. I just started to get weird file corruption. I can only guess that it was a hard drive fault because an replacement drive has eventually fixed it. However, I needed to back up a considerable amount of data, especially my music over the years, before I felt safe leaving the PC on for any length of time.
The blog issue was more fundamental. PNeo is our brand new spanking Porter Novelli blog. It’s a bit sparse right now but rest assured I’ll be blogging away on it from tomorrow like there’s no, well, tomorrow. The difficulty came in splitting what I talk about on here, with what I talk about on there. So from now on, I will have my professional social media planner hat on when I post to PNeo. As a PNeo blogger, I will be talking about a provider of corporate communications and social media. Initially this is going to encompass basic ‘How To’ advice and interviews, moving on to daily reactive posting. Everything else goes on here, with me wearing my bejewelled consumer battleshorts. This gives me leave to post about stuff like…
I’ve had a soft spot for online music streaming, especially the free sort, ever since I fell in love with Pandora. Then Pandora disappeared because I’m not American, the proxy workarounds no longer work that I can tell, and I had to make do with Last FM instead.
Some people prefer Last FM: I do not. I don’t like the added complexity of its social network. I tend to find that it will come up with choices of music that are unsuited to my taste whereas Pandora would just churn ‘em out. I’m not sure how well the reference model works for musical taste, given that musical taste can also depend on how you’re feeling at the time.
Enter Musicovery. It’s a good Pandora-like. I’m listening to it now. I’ve got it set to calm, positive World music. Last night I listened to calm, dark jazz. I had no idea Miles Davis did a version of Summertime, nor that a jazz version of Paranoid Android existed. Now I do. Music discovery=Musicovery.
But these two approaches are poles apart. It’s virtually impossible to zero in on a specific artist on Musicovery, while you cannot get going on Last FM without being specific about the artist or genre you want to listen to.
Spotify seems a very exciting midway solution. I have a colleague, who has a friend, who has a private beta account. He’s seen it, and he says it is amazing. Apparently the interface is very iTunes-like, but a kind of monochrome version thereof, and the streaming is high quality and responsive. So you’re pretty much running an online version of iTunes through a thin client.
Martin Varsavsky explains more:
You click on an album and you can listen to it, just like it was on your hard drive. You can also listen to the Artist Radio which will feature music from artists similar to the one you were looking at
In other words it looks as if it could offer something midway between Last FM and Musicovery. As Martin Varsavsky says, “It’s like Pandora without the need to vote and with your ability to listen to music anytime you want. It’s like Last FM without the community.”
I would love to get my hands on a private beta. In fact, I think I will. Watch this space…
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