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Digital Top Stories
We7 revamps, pushes personalised radio to the fore
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 10 November 2010
Spotify competitors We7 have this morning announced a revamp that will see their Pandora-style personalised radio service pushed to the fore. Bosses there say that the move has been motivated by user stats that show the personalised-radio streams have been their most popular service since they were added into the mix earlier this year.
Ironically, the personalised radio concept was one of the earliest online music business models to appear in the market, with Launch (later bought by Yahoo!) first appearing in 1999 and Pandora the following year. Both were available in the UK for a while, but eventually became US-only services because of prohibitive music licensing costs in Europe. Last.fm has also operated in this area for a long time, of course, and geeks with very long memories may remember the short-lived Chrysalis-owned personalised radio service Puremix.
The difference between personalised radio and Spotify-type set ups is that, with the former, you type an artist or song name into a box and press play, and then the service plays a non-stop random stream of music by the selected artist, and other artists considered by the system – according to some preset criteria or other – to be similar. Although there is normally the facility to skip and blacklist songs, users don’t themselves prescribe what they will listen to.
With Spotify – and what has been the main We7 service until now – you select a specific song or album, press play, and the chosen record will stream in order, in full. When it’s finished it stops, although more recently We7 automatically took users into a personalised-stream based on the previously listened to album. Of course, both Spotify and We7 enable users who want more variety to pre-programme their own playlists, though We7 says user data suggests most music fans would rather someone else did that for them.
Today’s revamp at We7 doesn’t mean any of the company’s existing services are being turned off, the full on-demand listening option – both by subscription or for free with ads – remains, though they are calling it ‘request’ listening so to stick with the radio analogy. But on arrival at the We7 home page it is very clear that the Pandora-style service is now at the core of the company’s offer.
Of course, cynics will assume the move is less motivated by user demand and more by cost savings, or a desire to be differentiated from Spotify. In an interview with PaidContent, We7 boss Steve Purdham admitted that the licensing costs associated with the personalised radio service were a third of those incurred by offering truly on-demand music and that therefore the ‘internet-radio’ element of what his company offers is much cheaper to run. Though he added that they ad rates his firm could charge on internet-radio were also generally less than with fully on-demand.
It’s possibly not surprising that many users prefer the radio stream product to the truly on-demand service, even though the latter offers much more freedom. With a Spotify-style service, while access to so much music on demand is initially awe-inspiring, deciding what to listen to when presented with so much music can be tricky, and setting up playlists is time consuming. And, of course, when many people listen to their own MP3 collections, rather than picking an album they just listen on shuffle.
We7’s move, therefore, may be a clever one. It still offers the truly on-demand functions, so can still say “whatever Spotify can do, we can do too”, but it can then push people towards the more cost efficient personalised radio option which most users may secretly prefer anyway. We7 also has the added bonus that while personalised radio is offered within the Spotify player, it’s the one thing the Swedish streaming music giant isn’t very good at. Job done.
Confirming the repositioning of his services, Purdham told CMU this morning: “In the UK, 51 million people use radio as their preferred method of accessing music. Music consumption is moving rapidly to an internet base but in the world of radio there has been little or no innovation to capitalise on this new potential. The internet has been viewed as just another traditional radio device. Great pioneering work done by Last.fm in the UK and Pandora in the US has shown that the potential is much bigger and We7 intend to go further to deliver real benefits to the next generation of internet radio listeners”.
