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Business News Digital Top Stories
Sky Songs closes
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 7 December 2010
BSkyB yesterday closed its short-lived digital music service Sky Songs, just over a year after it opened with a middle-sized fanfare. The subscription-based service offered a combination of unlimited streaming Spotify style with a bundle of MP3s included each month for download.
There was no free-to-use ad funded version of the service to woo customers – unlike Spotify and We7 – Sky presumably hoping it could upsell it to its existing TV and ISP customers without demonstrating how its pay-to-use music platform worked. It was a theory that didn’t pay off, as it happened, with Sky admitting yesterday it was shuttering the service because it had been “unable to reach a large enough customer base”.
Sky Songs’ loyal customers (anyone?) will stop paying as of now, though will still be able to access the service through to next February.
Sky’s music venture business model opted for ‘access’ over ‘ownership’, based on the belief that ultimately the future of digital music is in one-monthly-fee-gets-you-everything services rather than pay-per-track download stores like iTunes.
Attempts to launch subscription-based download platforms six years ago generally failed. But, buoyed by the potential and appetite for streaming services in the broadband age, and some albeit moderate successes in this domain in the US, a number of new ‘access’ services have entered the market in recent years. However, all pay-to-use streaming services will struggle to compete with the free version of Spotify, including, of course, the premium version of Spotify.
Which puts a lot of pressure on the ad-funded services – like those operated by Spotify and We7 – to actually work commercially once investor funding is spent. Whether that can happen remains to be seen. Some predict that free unlimited access services will eventually be phased out, with digital service providers and music companies hoping users of such services can then be persuaded to upgrade to pay-to-use equivalents for a nominal monthly fee. If and when that happens, launching Sky Songs type services will make sense again.
