Faced with a sharp decline in its own iTunes music sales, blamed largely on Spotify and other similar subscription services, Apple might also create an iTunes app for Android, to tap into the larger market share that Android-based phones enjoy.
Rather than sell songs by the track or by the CD, music subscription services such as Spotify charge a flat monthly fee, allowing subscribers to listen to all the streaming music they want. Spotify users can even download music to their phones, and it will keep playing as long as the subscription is kept up to date.
Spotify is, in a word, brilliant. In two words, life changing.
But part of the brilliance of Spotify is that it’s almost completely cross-platform. You can use the one service on Android devices, Apple iOS devices, Windows Phone devices, Sonos devices, PCs and Macs. It means that, as far as your music collection is concerned, you are completely free to buy whatever device you want.
If Apple were to release its own subscription service, and if it didn’t support all those platforms, one would have wonder why anyone would sign up to it. You would be locking yourself into Apple, the same way that buying tracks on iTunes locks you into Apple.
It may be just that reluctance to be locked into a platform that is causing the precipitous decline in music sales on iTunes. According to Billboard, Apple has suffered a “double-digit” decline in US iTunes sales, with albums down 13 per cent and individual tracks down 11 per cent.
Meanwhile, US subscription revenues at services such as Spotify were up 39 per cent last year, though presumably that’s off a smaller base.
Globally there was a 2.1 per cent decline in digital music sales last year, and a 51 per cent increase in subscription revenues.
Artists may not like subscriptions, but consumers love them. I love my Spotify subscription more than life itself. Now it seems Apple is coming around to loving subscriptions, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment