So today sees the launch of Spotify in Australia and as a result 22 million Australian’s now have the opportunity to access all the music they want legitimately.
There will be a lot of media debate this week about whether Spotify and streaming subscription services will impact iTunes especially since there is a free service - users can listen for free in exchange for listening to three to four minutes of advertising every hour.
But we should be wary not to jump on this bandwagon and look around the world and see where streaming subscription services and iTunes operate together and where iTunes remains the dominant digital service retailer even though Spotify has launched there and been up and running for a while. It is only in markets such as Sweden, where Spotify first launched in 2008 that Spotify is the number one digital contributor – after four years!
As Kate Vale, who heads up Spotify down under cites “Our major competitor and the people we are trying to get onto Spotify are those that are illegally downloading music,” She believes there are about 2.8 million Aussies illegally downloading music every month.
Well if we can encourage 2.8million people to get with the story that music does matter and to start getting music via services that pay artists for their copyrights then that is a great thing!
And look at all the fun we can have with services like Rd.io and Spotify…
You can share tracks via Facebook, twitter in one click
And there are all the apps that are being integrated into Spotify. My favourite of the moment being We are Hunted. All these apps are there to enable us to discover music.
You can create playlists and subscribe to them to get updates…
Here’s some playlists Warner has created for your listening pleasure…follow us on Facebook or Twitter or subscribe via Facebook and we’ll make sure you get to know all the tunes we’re loving as we discover them.
-Beth A
