Amazon’s March 29th announcement of its cloud-based music storage service – named Cloud Drive – and a desktop and mobile app to play the music on PCs, Macs and Android phones – with the rather predictable name, Cloud Player, took no-one by surprise. Similar services from Apple and Google are expected to follow.
Nonetheless, the announcement is a welcome, major brand vindication of the business models of the existing cloud-based locker services, such as MP3tunes.com and mSpot in the US, and and Tunesbag in Europe. It must make sense in the battle against piracy to encourage people to acquire music legally through the Amazon MP3 store and then let them access it wherever they are through Cloud Drive/Player. It’s just that Amazon didn’t get major label agreement to the service prior to launch.
The 100lb gorilla lurking the corner, however, is new listening habits. Forrester Research’s Mark Mulligan identified this problem earlier this year in an excellent piece on the music listening habits of younger teenagers, whom he dubs ‘Digital Natives’. Mulligan points to data showing that they no long rip, sideload and hoard music in the way that the first generation of fans exposed to digital music did. Instead they find music and listen to it there and then, expecting to be able to come back to it whenever they want. Mulligan describes these listening habits as ephemeral music consumption. He gave a video inteview on these ideas after his keynote speech at MIDEM this year.
At Psonar we’re aiming to meet the needs of these digital natives – the ‘mobile music generation’ with a service that not only lets fans listen to music ‘ephemerally’ – paying 1c / 1p /1 eurocent to stream one track once – but also lets them integrate music into their social lives. Psonar enables people to share music legitimately or even to gift playlists to other people, where the giver has paid for the recipient to listen to the music one or more times – on the basis of 1p / 1c /1 eurocent for each play of each track.
Music doesn’t just need to be easy to buy, store and access, it also needs to be available without ownership commitment where people can share or gift it – and all at a price that makes piracy not worth the hassle.
Posted by Martin Rigby 
