Penny Pinching Online Music

We’ve had Spotify for a while, which was, and under some aspects still is, very innovative. We have iTunes Radio, Pandora, Last.fm. We have borderline-legal services like Grooveshark. In other words, if you want to listen to music, you’ll probably find something free, or very close to free, especially if you live in the US.

Google, arguably a bit late to the party, recently added All Access to its Google Play Music service. It’s almost identical to Spotify. It was made available in Italy only a few days ago, and I immediately jumped on board, if only to grab the limited 7.99 €/mo offer (normally it would be priced at 9.99 €/mo).

This has made me completely shift the way I consume music. In just a few days.

I know, all you Spotify users are saying: “Been there, done that.”

That was you. This is me. You see, I even tried Spotify a while ago but hated the way it forced playlists on you for offline access from Android. I know it’s silly, but I find it just terrible. I want to manage my music in a (pretty normal) Artist – Album – Song hierarchy. Sure playlists are cool, but they shouldn’t be the only way to prepare content for offline access. Come on, it’s 2013. Besides, I already had uploaded all my music to Google a while back, and having to manage two services, two apps… it felt cumbersome.

At any rate, I activated my 30-day free trial, ready to pay 7.99 € next month. So I started listening to random stuff. Explore, you might say. Very nice, very fast streaming, even on HSDPA, but above all, excellent integration with your existing library: once you add an album to your library, it’s basically indistinguishable from other albums you have uploaded or purchased previously, if only for the fact that you can’t download plain mp3 files. You can even customize album and song metadata!

As the excitement of this new thing slowly faded away, it left space for another thought. A somewhat alarming thought.

Google believes to have ensnared another customer (me). In a way, it has. The only problem is, Google will be getting much less money from me now than before.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but I did a quick check and it turned out I purchased 8 full albums in the last 8 months, that is roughly 9 €/mo. Now I’m paying 8 €/mo, but I’m listening to tons more music, thus avoiding to purchase full albums and consuming much more bandwidth. I’m sure this aspect has been figured out by Google, Spotify and the others, but there’s something that doesn’t quite add up. I suspect it must be that “regular” album sales from digital stores continue to be very limited compared to illegal downloads, so this must be a part of the answer.

The point is that Spotify is (was?) independent from labels. It wasn’t a labels/industry idea, instead it was an independent idea that was forced on labels, one illegal download at a time. Google, on the other hand, had to jump on board to avoid losing money to Spotify and the other early comers.

For now we, the customers, win. I don’t see any other viable model honestly – pretty much everything is moving from pay-per-use to subscription-based – but there must be something they’re not telling us.