Music sales get more social with Spotify

28-04-2010

by Ralph Averbuch

Spotify aims to prove that a sprinkle of social dust equals music sales

And so to the heady world of the music industry. At the moment there appear to be two quite opposing approaches to providing and monetising music downloads. The first is summed up as the music industry old guard trying to use a stick to beat internet users into submission by getting governments to introduce much stricter laws. The British government exemplifies the music lobby's efforts: it just just pushed through legislation that will provide the opportunity to unilaterally cut off any internet user repeatedly accused (note: accused) of illegally sharing copyrighted music. The legislation also puts the onus on ISPs to police the whole thing.

Then there's the altogether more progressive approach, which hopes to embrace the popularity of music as part of the fabric of our culture and make it very easy to access, share and ultimately buy. Available in Ireland is we7.com. It's an excellent web-based music service which opts for the carrot, with much less stick. Perhaps even better but harder to get in the Republic at the moment is Spotify. Provided you can set up a UK proxy, you can download and try it out.

But what's most interesting is how Spotify has just launched a plethora of new sharing features which work in conjunction with Facebook to allow you to share favourite playlists with friends. It's likely to be the way that people opt to buy music in the future. There are few better ways to prompt a purchase than personal recommendation, and this is especially true in music, where friends love to recommend favourite music to friends. And, because Spotify has a monthly subscription model which lets people place all the music on either an iPhone or Android mobile, it provides a simple and legitimate way to meet the demands of convenience required to find a successful formula for discouraging the pirating of music.

Without doubt, if set at the right price-point and made to fit into the lifestyles of those using the service, rather than the demands of the music industry, there really is an opportunity to prove that most of us, most of the time, are ready to buy our music legally. Go check out one possible future for legal music in this Spotify video explainer.

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