FREE TO BROWSE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 201     15/04/2011

Last month I finally succumbed and took out a subscription to Spotify Premium, and the steps that lead me there are rather illuminating about this increasingly popular online music business model. In his RWC Web Applications column this issue, Kevin Partner experiments with free versus paid-for web services, and I believe my experience with Spotify, when contrasted with Apple's iTunes model, complements Kevin's insights rather well.

I've been using Spotify for two and a half years now, almost from its 2008 launch, but for the first two I used only the free, ad-supported, version and stoutly resisted their paid-for service. I soon became hooked on the ability to sample different kinds of unfamiliar music that I would never have thought of buying, and so when I discovered that the free service wasn't available in Italy I struggled for a while using UK proxy servers but eventually caved in and signed for the £5 per month Unlimited service which *is* available in Italy and has no adverts. Then a couple of months ago I discovered that only the £10 per month Premium service is available for mobile phones, and I was sufficiently curious to try Spotify on my Android mobile that I coughed up (I could always cancel if I didn't like it). But the increase in utility was so enormous that suddenly it seemed cheap at the price.

It may just be that I'm the ideal Spotify customer and that this process of luring by degrees won't work on younger users, users who have the iPod habit, or users with particularly fixed and narrow tastes in music. But I'm not so sure. Kevin's conclusion is that any payment at all is an enormous obstacle to new custom, and that offering free trials is more cost effective than even the smallest compulsory subscription. You then need to devise a premium offering that adds sufficient utility to persuade people to pay up, which means that it has to be truly excellent, not just a bit of added fluff. I first encountered, and was captured by, a similar model with the New York Review of Books, whose print edition I've subscribed to for many years. As I spent more and more time working online it became more and more useful to me to be able to search that magazine's archive and download previous articles, especially when abroad where my paper copy wasn't available. The NYRB wisely charges a modest, $20 annual premium for such full archive access, which I gladly pay and feel I get value from.

Contrast with Apple's philosophy of tying closed hardware firmly to tightly-regulated marketplaces is stark. The price of individual tracks from iTunes is sufficiently modest not to deter buyers, but buy them you must - no free roaming around the store. This model is a phenomenal commercial success, to the point where almost the whole print publishing (and soon film) industry is grovelling to Steve Jobs to save them from digital apocalypse. The problem for me with this model is that it's brand dependent: you need to know what you want, whereupon Apple will supply it in unbeatably slick and transparent fashion. My problem is that I don't consume music (or books) that way.

I spend a lot of time reading and walking and in neither case do I want a laptop or tablet in my hand. I've never really learned to love the iPod though I have used MP3 players. I possess a large, ecletic record collection on vinyl and CD which  ranges from opera and classical through jazz, blues, soul, old R&B to country and bluegrass. I've ripped some of my CDs but could never be bothered to digitize all that vinyl, nor pay thousands of pounds to those services that do it for you. My tastes are highly volatile and unpredictable so even a few thousand tracks on an MP3 player aren't enough, and access is too clumsy.

Whole evenings on Spotify are devoted to hearing every conceivable version of "These Foolish Things", or comparing half a dozen performances of the Goldbergs, or exploring some wholly new genre. Last week I went to modern guitar recital at the Wigmore Hall and afterwards spent days exploring composers like Brouwer, Bogdanovic and Duarte. I'd never do that if I had to explicitly pay even 50p to download each track (even ones I might reject after 10 seconds). The freedom to browse is worth £120 per year to me because Android phone plugged into hi-fi or earphones has become my sole music source, replacing both CDs and downloads.

Not all record companies and managements have yet signed up with Spotify - notable exceptions being Bob Dylan and The Beatles - but I have what I want of them in my collection (and if the service succeeds in the USA I believe they'll come knocking). Such free, ad-supported services that lead you toward value-added premium services will eventually prove more effective at extracting payment than Apple's walled-garden approach, for books, film and TV as well as music. Encouraging people to explore and broaden their tastes rather than reinforcing brand loyalties also spreads the proceeds to artists outside of the Top 10, which could be why some larger companies are resisting...