Spotify is a Winner

Spotify has taken over the digital music era in a way no other music service has done before: providing users with unlimited streaming music from a music library with a size and scope similar to that of iTunes. Best of all, it’s free and legal to use this service, making it unlike any of its competitors because users can listen without engaging in music piracy.

For me, I feel like Spotify became popular in the U.S. in the fall of this past year. Originally, new users could join the site by invitation only, but Spotify worked with Facebook to allow anyone with a Facebook account to use the source by logging in with their Facebook email and password. Because of this, users who’d signed up through their Facebook accounts had whatever music they were listening to “published” on the Facebook Ticker feed:

If I were to mouse over the music note symbol, the window enlarges to show more details about the user’s Spotify use.

If I were to click the music note symbol, it would automatically load the Spotify application (if it were downloaded onto my computer) and start playing the song.

The application layout is fairly similar to other music applications like iTunes. Here is a screenshot of the login page when you first open the application:

As you can see on the left-hand side of the page, there is a list of sections within the application and subcategories of sections beneath:

MAIN SECTION

What’s New: displays the featured albums and Spotify Apps, new releases, and trending/top playlists among Spotify friends (those Facebook friends connected through the app)

People: displays a list of a user’s Facebook Friends connected on Spotify and if they use the service often enough, you can click on their name and a list of their public playlists and top tracks appear.

Inbox: All of the music sent to you from your friends can be found here

Play Queue: Shows what will be playing next on the app, or the “history” tab within this section shows what songs were recently played

Devices: A place for users to connect their iPhones, Androids, and iPods (with their subscription service) to take tracks with them on the go

APPS

App Finder: Shows different types of applications one can add to their Spotify experience, like a synced lyrics app, a Billboard Top Charts app that shows playlists based on the top hits, and an app that changes its playlists based on which mood you are feeling.

Top Lists: A list of top songs and albums for the United States, World, and through your personal listening history

Radio: A Pandora-like feature that develops playlists based on artists you select

COLLECTION

Library: A combination of both starred and “Local Files” music (see below)

Local Files: The mp3s already found on your computer (from an iTunes Music folder, perhaps? ;) )

Starred: Your already “bookmarked” music from the Spotify library

PLAYLISTS

Here is where you can create your own playlists for public or private listening, or add others’ playlists as a bookmark.

OTHER

Also notice there’s the album cover from the track currently playing on the bottom left like in iTunes, the music control buttons on the bottom of the application, and on the right side of the application, there is a “Favorites” area to add people whose music you’d like to closely follow, as well as a real-time feed of the songs everyone is listening to through the application (or if there hasn’t been any action for awhile, a list of friends’ last played songs through the app). If you were to click onto one of those songs, you could have the option to immediately play the song in the application.

Spotify touts that all of the artists and record labels get paid for every song play, but you may wonder how they are able to do that if most functions are freely available to anyone with the application downloaded onto their computer. This is where Chris Anderson’s freeconomics business models come into play, and Spotify definitely exemplifies the “freemium” and “advertising” models.

Under the freemium model, there is both a free and paid version of the services available, in that the paid version offers a significant advantage over the free model. Spotify uses this strategy, claiming that the premium version offers users the ability to ignore ads, listen to unlimited music (to be discussed later), use the playlists without being connected to the Internet (how they do this, I’m curious…), play music from a mobile device, and enhanced sound quality of 320 kbps (the same as typical CD quality). The service costs $9.99 per month, which for some may be an inexpensive way to vicariously “own” millions of tracks at once.

The “advertising” model simulates many other free services, especially in the internet freeconomics world where third-party companies pay the host company to offer banner ads, commercials, etc. to its users to compensate for users not paying for anything. Spotify has whole-heartedly embraced this strategy, as I have seen banner ads and heard radio-like ads for both music products and other commercial goods. Spotify has also used its advertising space to promote its own premium service and holiday playlists. With the audio ads in between songs, Spotify does not allow users to skip the ads, ensuring users listen to the ads and the third-party companies have gotten value from their media dollars.

Spotify has brought a new frontier and hope to those who wish to listen to music without engaging in piracy or having to pay. Spotify originally started in early 2009, and according to this article by TorrentFreak, “it took only three months before the number of Spotify users had outgrown the number of music pirates”. That is an incredible amount of new users. Additionally, the article said that “the numbers of people who download music illegally has decreased by more than 25 percent, and over the last year alone it dropped by 9 percent”. Since its US launch, in August, a month after the release, the All Things Digital Blog states that the streaming music service had “already signed up 1.4 million U.S. users for its free trial…has 175,000 paying U.S. subscribers…for a conversion rate — of 12.5 percent”. That’s a huge number compared to Chris Anderson’s typical 1% turnover from free into paying customers. It seems like Spotify’s initial positioning as “an alternative to music piracy” has served it very well as over the last few months music piracy has become a hot topic again.

As a Spotify user (who will likely never go premium), I find the service useful to listen and share music, see what others are listening to, and use it as a interim for songs that I want to own but haven’t bought yet, while still being able to listen to my own files in one application. The ads can be annoying at times, but I understand that it’s necessary to keep the business running.

Buying Conveniently with eBay

Alas, due to contractual obligations I am still a BlackBerry user, so I’ve never been especially attracted to using apps on my phone because of the small screen and not-so-great user interface compared to Apple’s iPhone. Luckily when BlackBerry was still a fairly popular type of smartphone and other regular cell phones started coming out with a mobile Internet feature, many companies developed mobile microsites of their main website to make themselves accessible to customers on-the-go. eBay is one of those companies, and their microsite optimized for mobile devices makes it easy for customers to take their selling and bidding on the go, as if they were using the full-featured website.

To use the microsite, all one has to do is type in “www.ebay.com” into their address bar on the mobile browser. From there, this screen appears (please ignore the watermarks from the third-party app I had to use to take the screenshots since it’s not built into BB’s interface – can you tell I can ‘t wait to upgrade? J ):

From the homepage, users can search for specific items through the search bar, browse categories of items offered on the site, or scroll to the bottom to manage their personal eBay account.

Let's pretend I was searching for some jewelry through eBay on my phone. If I click the jewelry tab, it lists a broad range of jewelry categories from which to choose:

I’m feeling a bit extravagant today, so I chose to search for designer jewelry to wear as a good luck charm for when I’m taking tests. A page appears listing all of the major designer jewelry brands available on the site.

I picked Chanel this time because lately I've been picking Dior and Louis Vuitton and I felt bad I hadn’t bought anything from Coco recently. A list of all of the Chanel products came up for me to peruse to my liking:

These earrings I found just exude the timeless Chanel look, therefore I had to review the listing:

As I scrolled down the page, the browser provided a summary of key information about the listing:

The earrings will be the perfect companion to my Marketing on the Internet exam this Monday. I must buy them:

As I scrolled down the page to commit to buying them, suddenly I realized I already have eighteen pairs of similar earrings. I figured I could probably find something else to suit my fancy. I decided I should check my account summary to see if I had anything else I’d bookmarked to buy at a later date, or if I’d heard any new information about the items I have up for sale.

Before I knew it, I was browsing iPhones in preparation of my June 18 upgrade date. I found this one, which (if I wanted) let me just make a bid on the phone, instead of outright buying it.

I think I’ll try to hold out for the iPhone 5.

eBay’s microsite is a great idea to cater to their fiercest buyers and sellers, in addition to serving to other shoppers in a time crunch. I think the main types of people using the microsite would be their current users who are desperate to watch auctions when they can’t be at computer, still being able to utilize a common bidding strategy that they employ to get the items they want. Under this strategy, the bidder rarely (if at all) bids on the item prior to just before the listing expires. This is because it may give the bidder the chance to be the last person to get their bid in so they win the item, and may also lower the final cost of the item, because there is hardly any downtime for other bidders to raise the price through their counterbids (which could very easily happen if someone bids their maximum bid with days to spare before the auction closes). The times when auctions end on eBay are generally completely random, so it can be hard for these buyers to plan their whole day around one auction ending online. The microsite gives them the ability to be places like the doctor’s office or the aquarium, yet still be able to win the item that they want because they can use their phone to get their last bid in. This goes likewise for sellers, who may be anticipating the close of one of their auctions and want to know once it ends how much money they’ve made. The microsite gives them the convenience to stay connected wherever they have cell phone service, I’m sure alleviating many from anxiety about not being able to check their eBay auctions.

The site can also be useful for people who realize they need something on-the-go and are in a time crunch to get it. The site can help those who are on a plane or train going home for the holidays to find presents for loved ones that they hadn’t had time to buy. Once they decide what they want to buy, they can just input the address of the person they want the gift delivered to and pay for it online. This will help them save face when everyone else is opening presents, because they can just show the gift recipient what will be coming in the mail for them.

Overall, the mobile site is very effective as a mini-version of their main site. It takes elements of the full site (i.e. the list of categories) and breaks them down so that it is easy for cell phone browsers to load, cutting time and data. Even with the smaller site screen and layout, I noticed eBay was still able to load one of its own ads for users to see and maybe display something that they could be interested in.

I am curious to know if after awhile, the ads are capable of becoming tailored based on my mobile browsing data as it would if I were on the main website. The mobile site also ensures that users understand that when they make a bid, they are making a formal agreement to buy the item. I would imagine this helps customers (especially those who sign up for an account through the mobile site) realize they should not bid on something that they can’t actually buy because winning an auction isn’t quite like winning a game.

I find the site quite useful, but the only thing that I think may come up as a problem is that the information for the listings is limited to general, categorical information about the item(s). The mobile site doesn’t show the seller’s individual comments about an item, for example if there was a scratch or a hole; something specific about the item that may influence potential buyers to purchase or not to. People who may be browsing and purchasing solely from their phone may be disappointed if they found out something they’d bought had a scratch on it that they didn’t know about beforehand. I think to minimize those types of problems, it is best to do what I did when actually used the site to buy my computer at the beginning of the school year, by picking out the one I wanted beforehand and then just using the site to place a last-minute bid since I couldn’t be at a computer when the auction ended. With this method, I was able to time my break at work so that I could be on my phone right before the auction ended so I could get my final bid in and win the item before anyone could retaliate. Needless to say, I returned from my break a happy camper.

eBay has brought functionality and convenience on-the-go for its auction-obsessed fans. While I don’t use the site often enough to care about looking into a mobile app for the BlackBerry platform, it serves me as a holdover if I want to buy something online until my magical June 18 upgrade date.