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Digital Top Stories
Consumer Focus say legit digital services have low profile
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 9 March 2010
The other body publishing research this week is consumer rights group Consumer Focus, who generally oppose measures that could result in consumers having their net connections suspended.
Their study says that, while an increasing number of licensed digital music services are now available for those trying to move away from dodgy file-sharing, awareness of those services among the masses is pretty low. Even a much reported on service like Spotify has a relatively low profile among the masses, the consumer rights group says.
Consumer Focus says that more work must be done to promote legal services before any three-strikes style suspensions begin. Their boss Jill Johnstone told CMU: “The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal online music services. If file-sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort in to promoting the legal alternatives? Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options”.
One of the issues, of course, is that since the original dot com boom most digital services have generally employed viral and word of mouth marketing to build user-bases rather than the sort of big budget ad campaigns which would reach mainstream consumers – therefore services which have a very high profile among early adopters are still a mystery to many.
The boss of one London-based legit music service, We7’s Steve Purdham, agrees that this trend has had an impact on public awareness for licensed platforms, while adding that services like his prefer the sort of steady growth word of mouth delivers because it helps them keep better control of their user base, which can’t grow too rapidly because of the costs of providing licensed music streams. He told CMU: “We7 has grown from zero to three million monthly UK users primarily by word of mouth. There is a significant reason [why we prefer that method] – the cost of providing the music can be significant. Ensuring growth keeps in pace with sales or funding is critical for a legal service”.
Given the digital service providers often opt for ‘below-the-line’ marketing, does that mean the music industry should be funding a more high profile ‘these are legit’ campaign? Purdham, perhaps unsurprisingly, thinks so. He continued: “I think the biggest activity for the majors, government and music streaming services is to heavily promote the legal partners, such as We7, Last.fm and 7Digital, and drive that educational message home. We7 lets people have music for free with ads or a small monthly fee if they don’t want ads. The best way to destroy piracy is to promote the legal services more aggressively”.
Always keen to do its bit, CMU is currently putting together a list of all the licensed digital music services operating in the UK. It’s very much a work in progress, but if you know about these things (or run a service) and can think of any legit services we are not currently listing, then drop us an email. You can see our work so far on this at www.legalmusicservices.co.uk.
