Album Not Dead Online, Long Tail May Be Dead at Mobile
Andre Paine's Popkomm recaps for Billboard.biz (Day 1, Day 2, Day 3) were good, but the recap with the best soundbites from the Berlin conference came from Jupiter analyst Mark Mulligan. Highlights:
24/7, the company that powers the bundled broadband & mobile music service for Denmark's TDC, said subscribers had downloaded 60 million tracks. (Mulligan pointed out that Denmark's population is only 5.4 million.) The service, PLAY, debuted on April 1 of this year and uses DRM for both mobile and PC downloads. Two bits I found to be fascinating: albums dominate single track downloads, and PC downloads outnumber mobile downloads 30 to 1. The takeaway here is that the album format works well when there is no incremental cost (the subscriber pays a flat monthly rate regardless of volume). Skimping consumers will prefer single tracks over albums. Gluttonous consumers will take albums over single tracks.
Frank Taubert from 24/7 Entertainment, which powers online stores as well as mobile music services, said 3 million out of the service's 4.5 million tracks had not been played even once. "The long tail is dead," wrote Mulligan, adding that the figure "could well hint at just how limiting discovery is on mobile."
Jamie Kantrowitz from MySpace said MySpace Music had logged 40 million streams in the U.S. with 17-18 streams per person in its first seven days of operation (that would mean 2.2 million people in the U.S. streamed music that week). Compare that number to the billion streams MySpace said were streamed "in only a few days after launching the new product." Two comments. First, unless the U.S. is the source of about 2% of MySpace streams, those two numbers do not jibe. Second, that's only $400,000 at a penny a stream. Or about $57,000 per day. Small potatoes.
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