By Tim Crow on June 11th, 2010

Tags: Default, Digital marketing, Downloads, Facebook, Football, Football Sponsorship, New Product Development, Olympic sponsorship, Social Media, Vancouver 2010, Winter Olympics, World Cup

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@synergytim tweeted this morning about a music download service soon to be launched by Sky. Sky Tunes, it says here, will take on iTunes and offer a bona fide alternative in the music download market which is to say these days, the music market per se. It’s the second such service to have crossed my bows in as many weeks, the first having been brought to my attention my my 11-year-old daughter Maddie who received what she perceived to be a genuine offer of free music from her mobile provider, Vodafone. Being the sensible girl that she is (she gets it from her mother) she first checked with me to see if it was OK to reply “yes” to Vodafone’s text and receive 10 tracks of her choice, for free.

I checked it out to find that had she done so, she would have been able to choose her 10 tracks from the UK top 50-ish, and then would have committed with no further action on her part, to a monthly subscription of £5 added to her mobile bill, for which she would have received a further 10 tracks and “the option to buy loads more”. Dangerous stuff when you’re 11 years old and Daddy pays your phone bill, so we declined to proceed.

@synergytim’s tweet reminded me of this today, as I checked out Sky’s service as described in The Guardian, finding that for a monthly subscription of £7.99 I could receive 10 tunes or an album each month. Pricier than the Vodafone service and with no apparent differential benefit.

If I understand these services correctly, I believe that in both cases should I neglect to choose tracks or albums or if I forget, the service provider will choose my music for me. How kind.

Digital natives will be too young to remember a company called Britannia Music, but migrants may recall how in the 1970s and 80s, members of the Britannia Music club, snared by the offer of four albums for £1 each, then paid about £5 per month to the club, for which they received the Britannia Music-selected “Album of the Month” in their chosen format: LP, cassette or 8-track (this last is a dimly recalled format from my pre-school days, I assure you). The entire catalogue of Britannia Music was available for purchase at full or discounted prices. Funny, but all the stuff I listened to always seemed to be full price.

Sky Tunes and the Vodafone Music Club use similar mechanics to the old Britannia Music club, adapted for the digital age. Having wasted my hard-earned pocket money as a teenager on Kirsty MacColl’s Desperate Character and Witchfynde’s appalling debut Give ‘Em Hell, I want to warn all you young folk out there that there is a better, more transparent way of buying music. It’s called iTunes and whilst I welcome competition in the free market, the above two examples are not it because they are fundamentally not transparent. Not honest, even.

These lock-you-in-to-a-punitive-contract music supply services are not new and offer nothing that can not be obtained for similar prices or cheaper elsewhere.  The Guardian points out two added benefits of the Sky service: first, that its tracks come DRM-free and can be played on any MP3 player whereas iTunes tracks require an iPod. With iPods dominating the personal music scene to as great a degree as Microsoft dominates the personal computer OS market, this seems a dubious benefit. And second: Sky offers unlimited streaming for free, which is nice, but I get that anyway via Last.fm and Spotify. I have done so for months.

And where do I listen to these free music services? On my iPhone and iPod, of course.

By Scott Garrett on October 12th, 2009

Tags: Default, Digital marketing, Downloads, Music, New Product Development

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So John Cleese will be footing a £12.5 million bill for his divorce of second wife, Alyce Faye Eichelberger. As Cleese put it, “I got off lightly. Think what I’d have had to pay if she’d contributed anything.” Whatever the reason for this split, there may be more proceedings to be filed over the coming months, following news of the imminent release of Championship Manager 2010 from software house Eidos.

For a limited time only, Eidos is offering its revered football management title to online consumers through a ‘pay what you think it’s worth’ mechanic. Aside from a non-negotiable £2.50 ‘delivery charge’, buyers can theoretically spend as little as a penny extra to own the game. It’s an audacious move, with even the staunchest of CM fans likely to pay less than RRP to get a piece of their narcotic of choice. The risk-reward ratio must come down to how many new enthusiasts/devotees/junkies can be brought into the franchise through either the reality of the deal, or the PR noise it’s made. It’s brave, it’s bold, but one has the feeling it’s based on a commercial reality – surely someone at Eidos has done their sums before this launch got the green light? Radiohead employed a similar tactic on the release of their album ‘In Rainbows’ and claimed to enjoy the last laugh, making more money than all their other albums put together.

The fact is that much of this has been made possible by the move from the physical to the virtual transaction. Whilst there’s no suggestion that making £2.51 a time off a product traditionally retailing at around £40 will keep the CEO in your pocket, the shift from purchase off-shelf to online does fundamentally change the business model: no packaging, no CD, no negotiated shelf-space, no point of sale material…no hassle. It’s not as though this is anything new – software has always been available via the internet, legally or otherwise, but the bandwidth has got broader and the delivery mechanisms more mainstream. We’re not talking about shady P2P software ‘shopping’ services for the tech-savvy, but point-and-click, monetised downloads for the wider PC/console/mobile user.

The iTunes App Store blazes a trail with its well-vaunted billion downloads worldwide, giving an impression as to the appetite of iPhone and iTouch owners for the various games, utilities and services available. Similarly, both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 have their own download services for the broadband generation, offering software updates – such as the well-publicised England kit that Umbro automatically ‘launched’ in Pro Evolution Soccer – and full games. In fact, digital distribution of this kind of content – whilst not a replacement for a physical purchase given the size of modern console games versus their in-built storage capacity – has proven hugely profitable for a number of companies. The classic software title Worms, recouped its development costs within four hours of its release on Xbox Live Arcade – a staggering feat without a single CD in sight.

And now, Championship Manager, the football sim notable for its reputation of turning male university students into soccer stat-devouring zombies after countless all-night sessions on their PCs – long the bane of other halves across the globe. Officially cited in over 35 divorce proceeding to date, it’s the pastime that makes regular football widows grief look half-baked, and the dirty little secret that should set alarm bells ringing in any prospective relationship. With incidences of laptops being thrown from windows following any given catastrophic loss, to that of the player fabled to have dressed in a suit and tie for his team’s appearance in the FA Cup Final – the game has created its own Masonic subculture of transfer tips, war stories and spousal rejection.

And thanks to the Eidos honesty box, it’s about to get worse…

By Jonathan Izzard on August 20th, 2009

Tags: Default, Downloads, Football, Mobile, New Product Development

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