31/01/2012
Extract courtesy of Midem News 2012 Edition 2
Psonar, the new music service offering a simple payment model to revolutionise access to streamed music in the same way that pay-as-you-go revolutionised mobile phone access, has signed a licensing deal with INgrooves, the digital music marketing and distribution firm, at midem.
Psonar Signs Deal with INgrooves - L to R Psonar's Simon Lait and Martin Rigby, INgroove's Alex Branson - (c) Midem News
Instead of offering a limited amount of free (ad-supported) use or monthly subscriptions, Psonar’s Pay-Per-Play (PPP) payment system is affordable and simple by charging one pence/one cent/one eurocent per track.
Users are able to pay via phone bills (pre-pay/contract), credit/debit cards or PayPal. “The deal offers a whole new way of reaching a whole new audience by driving content to kids who listen to music on mobile devices,” said Martin Rigby, UK-based Psonar’s CEO.
“The platform’s viral capacity offers a great capacity to music fans,” added Alex Branson, senior vice-president/managing director at INgrooves, which has 1 million tracks in its catalogue. “There are already acts who have 10 million streams on YouTube; Psonar is like that but more targeted, and can also encourage fans to go and buy.”
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Posted by Martin Rigby
31/12/2011
Over the past few months in selling the key ideas behind Psonar to labels and music industry pundits I’ve often been pushed back with the argument ‘what’s so different about Psonar – it’s just Spotify with a different payment model’. At first glance, Psonar does offer the same as Spotify – on-demand per track music streaming – but with Pay-Per-Play as the basis of charging rather than a limited amount of free, ad-supported use or a range of monthly subscriptions. But that misses the point – it’s all about being truly social.
Psonar iPhone App
From the music fan perspective, Psonar has a simple payment model that’s available to teenagers (tagged as ‘Digital Natives’ by Mark Mulligan in this
Forrester Report in January 2011) and other people without credit cards. It can revolutionise streaming music access in the same way that ‘Pay As You Go’ revolutionised mobile phone access. More importantly, Psonar empowers peoples’ desire to share music – create a playlist in the Psonar app and gift it to anyone else to listen. The recipient only has to click on a link and the Psonar web app will immediately play on their smartphone, tablet or computer with no need to sign-up or sign-in. The donor pays 1p / 1c / 1 eurocent for each track gifted – so 10p for a 10 track playlist – and can pay through their phone bill (contract or pre-pay), credit card or PayPal.
For artists and labels, Psonar opens up a whole new world of viral and social marketing. By gifting plays to their fans, artists encourage them to spread the music on to their friends in turn. And fans are rewarded for sharing: 1 free play for every 10 Pay-Per-Play tracks played as a result of their gifting or sharing activity. Psonar play links can be embedded in tweets, Facebook updates, emails, texts, IM messages, blog posts and on artists’ and labels’ websites or Facebook pages. Psonar play links can be configured to allow different fan behaviour, such as play once or many times or allow gifting to one person or many people. This flexibility gives artists and labels, especially independents, the power to create a viral marketing campaign that’s tailored to the demographics and behaviour of their fans. Importantly, they can limit the number of plays that are free – knowing that any further spread monetizes on a Pay-Per-Play basis.
No-one can doubt the challenge we face in launching and growing Psonar. We’ve been lucky that some important players in the global music industry (The Orchard, INgrooves, Essential Music, Virtual Label, Skint/Loaded, Stealth Records to name a few), especially in the independent music sector, appreciate our vision and have partnered with us. At the start of the year when Congress will decide whether to pass the most draconian anti-piracy measure yet contemplated to protect copyright, SOPA, Psonar is about liberating the potential of the web to spread music and encourage listening in a way that rewards creators: to misquote Bill Cinton “it’s all about being social, stupid”.
Leave a Comment » | Company, Music, Updates | Tagged: Digital Natives, Essential Music, Forrester, INgrooves, iPhone, Loaded, Mark Mulligan, Psonar, Skint, SOPA, spotify, Stealth Records, The Orchard, Virtual Label | Permalink
Posted by Martin Rigby
30/12/2011
Psonar’s iPhone app was finally approved by Apple on Christmas Eve – but in a form that has some significant differences from the original submitted in August. Most significant is that you can’t register through the app – you have to that do on the Psonar website (and you have to return to the Psonar website to buy additional Credits).
That said, you can still play anything you want, create playlists and tweet them or send them to your Facebook timeline – and, most important of all, you can gift tracks and playlists to other people straight out of the app. Here’s what it looks like in iTunes:
Psonar in iTunes Preview
Apple’s determination to maintain high standards for the user experience with iPhone and iPad apps is laudable and has set the standard by which smartphone apps on all platform are measured. That said, I don’t really understand why Apple considers Psonar’s Pay-Per-Play payment model to be ‘rental’ and thereby contrary to App Store guidelines. Still, we’ve found ourselves in good company in having to separate payment from use to get the Psonar app approved – Amazon Kindle, LoveFilm and NetFlix have had to do the same as well.
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Posted by Martin Rigby
31/03/2011
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.
Leave a Comment » | 1, Company, Music, Updates | Tagged: Amazon, Cloud Drive, Cloud Player, Forrester, Mark Mulligan, mp3.com, mSpot, Psonar, tunesBag | Permalink
Posted by Martin Rigby
09/03/2011
Fresh from the south of France, having trailed its new Pay Per Play service launching in selected territories in mid 2011 at MIDEM, Psonar is off to Austin TX for the 2011 South By South West Festival as part of the UKTI Digital Mission.
While Steve Purdham, CEO of We7 was frank in a recent interview with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones about the challenges facing digital music businesses – and didn’t succeed in dispelling Cellan-Jones scepticism evident in the post “…I’m still not clear how an ad-supported service like We7 – already in quite a crowded digital music market – is ever going to become sustainable” – Psonar is offering something that fits much better with the way people are engaging with digital music.
The ‘mobile music generation’ – especially teenagers – want to access particular music, when they want it and from any device. Therefore, it’s got to be on-demand streaming, not seeded internet radio.
For the mobile music generation music consumption is ephemeral, as Mark Mulligan of Forrester explained so well at MIDEM. They want access to music to be so cheap that it’s almost free – which Psonar Pay Per Play offers at 1c / 1 eurocent / 1p to listen to one track once – not pay £120 pa for a streaming music service.
And the mobile music generation is also the Facebook generation and online social behaviour is integral to the way they live their lives. They want to share music with their friends and Psonar’s ability to let people gift playlists to each other, where the donor has pre-paid for the recipient to listen, is deeply social and potentially hugely viral.
We think 2011 is going to be an interesting year!
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Posted by Martin Rigby
11/12/2010
Everyone at Psonar is delighted that we’ve been selected for MidemNet Lab 2011 – the showcase for the world’s most exciting new digital music businesses. At the final in January 2011, held as part of MIDEM, the global music conference and exhibition, Psonar will compete against nine other businesses in the consumer services category. Séverine Aurivel, MidemNet Organiser, commented that this year “there was a very large number of entries, and the standard was very high”.
MidemNet Lab is the only international pitch platform for the world’s most innovative music startups and highlights the best companies bringing exciting new digital solutions to the music industry. Its second edition will take place at MIDEM, 23‐26 January 2011, Palais des Festivals, Cannes. MidemNet Lab is an important opportunity for us to find new business partners, as well get noticed by investors, and create more ‘splash’ so that yet more people will find out that Psonar is simply the best place to keep their music.
What we’re really excited about is the opportunity to showcase Psonar Pay-Per-Play – the radical new way to discover and enjoy new music that is completely legal and much better value-for-money than subscription streaming or buying every track you want to try.
Watch this space – more on Pay-Per-Play in the New Year!
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Posted by Martin Rigby
07/10/2010
Psonar is lucky to be a partner on the B-Side Project – the brainchild of the ever-energetic and visionary Yvette Chivers. The Project is looking to fuse the talents of emergent artists and dance music producers and showcase the music that comes out of the collaboration.
The idea is simple. In each of 9 cities from Berlin to Toronto, artists submit one or more tracks which are then allocated to a dance music producer who creates a remix of the track. A panel of judges in each city then picks the best ten local tracks which will be announced at a Showcase & Awards event and promoted globally by NExcuse.
Alpha Road
Tracey Browne
Psonar is the technical partner providing cloud-based access to the music entries for artists, producers and judges. In addition, BBC Introducing (the BBC project to discover new music talent) in each participating city in the UK will give airtime to selected music from the competition. If the artists who performed at the launch event in Cambridge (Tracey Browne & Alpha Road) are anything to go by, the musical output will be outstanding.
What I really like about the B-Side Project is the imaginative way it’s merging new original artist talent with the skill of producers to create exciting dance music and then promoting that music for exploitation either as recorded music or for use in film, television and advertising. It’s increasingly hard for new artists to get airtime and publicity in a world where the record companies are under pressure to concentrate on established acts and where there’s so much more competition for music fans’ listening time. Yvette Chivers’ vision for the B-Side Project deserves to succeed and Psonar will do everything it can to help her achieve that vision.
It’s too late to submit entries for Norwich and Cambridge this autumn, but entries for Leeds, Bristol, Brighton, Sheffield, Copehagen, Berlin, Barcelona & Toronto are opening early in the new year.
1 Comment | Company, Music, Updates | Tagged: Alpha Road, B-Side Project, BBC Introducing, Dance Music, Psonar, Remixes, Tracey Browne | Permalink
Posted by Martin Rigby
22/09/2010
Psonar recently doubled the rate of user signups (i.e. the proportion of people who visit the website and actually sign up) from around 5% to > 10% by making a few small but significant changes.
Psonar sign-up button
Firstly, we used crazyegg‘s heatmap to visualise where our users were clicking. This showed us that only a small number of users were clicking the ‘click here to sign up now’ link on the ‘Getting Started’ page – the most popular landing page from external sites.
We speculated that the colour of this link didn’t do much to make it recognisable as a call-to-action despite the wording, so we converted it to a red button. Remarkably, this change alone made the majority of the difference in signup rate.
In addition, we changed the ‘sign up now’ link in the website header on the homepage to a red button and added signup buttons to each of the other content pages so whichever page the user is browsing, the route to signing up is always clear. We also reordered the clickable icon links on the home page in order of popularity (also to an order that made more sense when using the service, chronologically speaking).
That’s it! Pretty basic stuff but very effective. Overnight, our signup rate doubled and has remained high ever since.
It’s also worth noting that the relative proportion of users who actually go on to use Psonar (download the SongShifter, upload their tracks and stream them for free using a web browser) has remained roughly the same; we did speculate that people who were put off by the difficulty in signing up may simply now be signing up and not actually using the site, but this hasn’t turned out to be the case.
These simple changes won’t work for everyone of course, but hopefully reading this post will prompt you to re-evaluate the signup process on your site. Making a few simple changes can have a very large effect, as we discovered.
2 Comments | Company, Updates | Tagged: browser, crazy egg, crazyegg, heat map, heatmap, music streaming, navigation, Psonar, signup, signup rate, songshifter, users | Permalink
Posted by Richard Urwin
03/09/2010
The speculation from ex-Lala users on Twitter, leading up to Steve Jobs’ presentation at the Apple music event yesterday was by-and-large reasonably optimistic. Many were hoping that he would announce that the streaming functionality from the popular but now defunct Lala had been integrated into iTunes to enable Apple device owners to stream the contents of their libraries via an online incarnation of iTunes.
Lala's technology appears not to have been reappropriated for iTunes after all
Most were sorely disappointed however; it now looks as if the technology may well have been reappropriated to deliver the improvements showcased with Apple TV instead.
To the uninitiated, this lack of streaming might seem a little strange, however looking more closely at the reasons behind it, I don’t think so.
- Apple iPods are designed to store thousands of tracks. Why on earth would Apple suddenly make the one of the primary function of these devices (a mainstay product) effectively redundant by allowing streaming of users’ libraries? Not to mention the massive associated costs streaming billions of tracks would incur.
- iTunes store download sales delivers an enormous amount of revenue to the labels; 10 billion tracks have been downloaded thus far and Apple is still currently the largest single retailer of music in the US with its 25% share. Adding streaming to iTunes would surely reduce the number of paid-for downloads thus eating into these profits. Would the labels have been happy with this?
- Apple takes large percentage of the revenue from download sales. More streaming and less downloads would simply mean less revenue since the amount changing hands is smaller; each user would have to stream several orders of magnitude more tracks to make up the shortfall.
- Apple is still geared very much towards selling downloads as illustrated by the announcement of Apple’s new music social network, Ping, Jobs also announced yesterday. Look no further than the fact that Ping is built into the iTunes store for confirmation of this.
- Why change your strategy in the market in which you’re already the dominant player and likely to remain so; additionally why switch to one which has so many legal challenges in terms of resistance by the labels? There are a number of big streaming players – the likes of Spotify, Rhapsody and now Sony’s Qriocity are all competing in an ever-more crowded space. Jobs has never led the company into uncharted territory – he has always taken a model that is gaining popularity and made it much more usable to unleash a wave of free spending new users. Streaming is a new field, especially on mobile devices, where there is no clear road-map for Apple to follow.
- The iPhone browser blocks downloads to force users to buy music and apps from iTunes. It would be much harder to block streaming services, whcih are already allowed on the iPhone without provoking outrage from existing users by removing such functionality. So streaming is not a usage mode that Apple wants to encourage.
So – perhaps streaming to devices in the Apple ecosystem might be delivered at some stage (after the labels have been won around in a desperate attempt to look for new revenue generation areas) but if you’re an ex-Lala user looking for Apple to deliver this streaming fix, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
All is not lost however; if you own a web-enabled Apple device and you want to stream your music, why not sign up to Psonar for free, upload all your tracks to the Psonar Cloud and browse to our mobile website where you can do exactly this. You can also download your music to any computer, any other device (Android, BlackBerry, MP3 player, laptop, etc.) or stream it to any web browser whenever you like, all completely free.
4 Comments | Company, Music, Updates | Tagged: Apple, Apple TV, downloads, iOS, ipod, itunes, iTunes store, lala, lala.com, macworld, MP3, MP3 Player, ping, steve jobs, streaming, twitter | Permalink
Posted by Richard Urwin
13/08/2010
We recently commissioned a video from the excellent animator, Mike Booth, to explain what Psonar is all about.
Amber Lamps, featured in "What is Psonar?"
You can watch it on the Psonar homepage or on YouTube instead if you wish.
Mike’s work includes animated shorts such as “God’s Voiceover” for the BBC’s Mitchell & Webb in which God does the voiceover for a dog food commercial (definitely worth a watch.) He’s also behind the popular ‘somegreybloke’ on YouTube. I like his recent explanation of “What Twitter is for”. You can also read his blog here. Psonar’s video was created using Smith Micro’s Anime Studio Pro.
The soundtrack, ‘Spaced Aged Funked’ by Le Jockey and Jamie Henderson is an outstanding homage to Chicago house in its own right. Listen to the full track here. Le Jockey also releases music on his own ‘HoresePlay’ label and you can listen to his tracks on SoundCloud or download some from HorsePlayDigital’s website. His latest EP, ‘Perfect Cadence’, released on Fullbarr Digital and available on Beatport contains several deliciously melodic, deep house tracks and is one of his best works to date.
The video and audio were assembled by Richard Millen from Cambridge Film & Television Productions.
Anyway, we hope you like the finished product. Please share it with your friends if you do!
Leave a Comment » | Company, Music, Updates | Tagged: Amber Lamps, Android, Cambridge Film & Television Productions, CFTP, cloud, dog food, iPhone, ipod, Jamie Henderson, Le Jockey, Mac, Macintosh, manage music, Mike Booth, Music, music backup, PC, personal music player, Psonar, psonar cloud, save music, Spaced Aged Funked, stream music, upload music, Video | Permalink
Posted by Richard Urwin
