Last week, it was all about Jay Z’s new Tidal launch, his new music streaming service – the star studded model that is set to revolutionize the way people approach music. He was accompanied on stage by some of the biggest names that we know of in the music industry, in the hope to draw some attention of fans and music lovers to this “artist owned” online music portal.
While this big news made some of the market critics run an analysis on whether Tidal is to make Spotify topple down its pinnacle, as a successful online music service platform for music lovers who are willing to subscribe; others thought it was time people need to reconsider the fact that Tidal might emerge as the winner.
According to a
#1. How Much is the Audience Willing To Pay?
Tidal subscription model will cost a person around $10 – $20 a month, for streaming digital files of high quality. A subscriber will get a 30-day free trial after applying for a subscription, after which he has to start paying for the service. Spotify, on the other hand, has a more flexible subscription model to follow, with product category classification for Free, Unlimited and Premium service. There are nearly 60 million users registered now, with approximately 15 million subscribers registered for the free version, which though might often be interrupted with ads, is nevertheless free.
The question therefore arises – whether the audience is actually willing to pay double the price for something they can avail of free.
#2. Is Tidal Designed For All
It may seem to make a hit with all the renowned musicians now supplying their exclusive content to Tidal (Rihanna’s new track ‘American Oxygen’ and Madonna’s official teaser for her “Ghost Town” video are some of the exclusive content that had been premiered over the weekend on Tidal). However, while we get to hear some of the big names who support Jay Z’s cause, the concern is how is Tidal aiming to help the less renowned artists?
#3. What Kind Of Marketing Strategy Will Get Tidal Reach More Audience?
It is not just Spotify alone that Tidal would be facing soon in the internet-marketing race. Big names like Apple, are expected to launch music streaming services too. If seen from a broader perspective, other music streaming platforms also present in the race include Pandora and YouTube. And the ultimate question that arises is, how Tidal plans to reach more audience amidst so many competitions laid ahead?
While it is still unknown what strategies Tidal aims to implement, but as far as news reports are concerned, Jay Z’s aim is to transform his site into an entertainment hub for social media and entertainment content. However, some of his music marketing strategy might include providing links to concert tickets and merchandise stocks.
These might not look anything different from the general music website design & music market strategies practiced by most musicians, but the message stands clear that Spotify has yet to teach Tidal and other budding music streaming websites the true art of online music marketing.
What Tidal and Emerging Music Streaming sites can learn from Spotify?
Today Spotify is considered a strong player platform in the music-marketing world, since it has been clever to implement certain internet marketing strategies, of which social media marketing has been the largest contributor. But other than utilizing social media as their powerful marketing tool, the website had made use of other factors to help them stay ahead strong in the music market competition.
#1. Proper Coordination between Music Labels and Listeners
When opening a music-streaming website for music lovers, one needs to understand the market. Reading the market is vital to understand the choice of songs among the music consumers. Consumers access your music website for a reason. They are in search of new collections or maybe one of their favorite music records. Therefore, music websites should keep their sites updated with sufficient collection of music for their customers to browse through.
Now, to have a vast collection of latest music records one needs to maintain proper coordination with the music artists or labels. Spotify had managed to maintain that by approaching musicians and labels with a contractual agreement. Once agreed, artists had begun to put up their music catalog online that ultimately led to draw the attention of consumers towards it.
It had coordinated with some of the top names in music labels like Warner Music, EMI, Sony Music and others, all of whom have added more than 15 million tracks on the music platform that had culminated to form engagement of over 18 million users and nearly 3 million subscriptions.
#2. Introduction of Bundling and Multiple Versions
Spotify had tried to grab the attention of different audiences through its multiple package versions. The famous music-streaming platform has three versions – the Free, the Unlimited and the Premium version. The free version provides listeners with new music sample to tryout, so that they can help grab the attention of new subscribers. The Free version comes for a limited time and the music video is frequently interrupted with promotion ads.
The Unlimited and the Premium version, on the other hand, are ad free and come with unlimited music streaming service. Here, the music streaming site had chosen to adopt the bundling approach, where we find the use of both computer and mobile devices to stream music. What one needs to understand here is that, the platform had tried to target a wide audience base no matter from which device he/she uses to access your service.
#3. Development of a Music Application
With smartphone usage now on the rise, the decision to go for application development was a clever idea. Spotify’s radio application can randomly generate a playlist of songs based on the user’s preference of genre or artists. One of the advantages of developing mobile apps for their service was that it reduced the cost of switching from one operating system to another.
By developing applications, for every operating system be it for iPhone, Android or Windows; Spotify makes it easier for customers to transfer from their competitor’s service and adapt easily to their application, while at the same time reducing the additional cost that one might have to incur when making the switch. This had helped the music site to raise its profits by making inroads into the market share of the competitor.
#4. Social Media Integration
A user must have a Facebook account to subscribe here. The social media strategy helped them to bridge a direct network between the product and other audience. Just like any other brands that use social media services to publicize their product, this website too had tried to add value to their music service with Facebook. How? Simple. A user can create a playlist and share it within his/her friend circle. This adds utility among the registered users, since they can access more songs by referring to the playlist.
Do you want to see how to a content can be turned into an effective video marketing strategy on the social platform? Take a look at how Spotify markets an online video ad on Facebook –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaDe9Pgkpl4
Today, it is one of the leading music streaming service sites online. The above strategies had helped the platform to grow strong that had finally placed a tough challenge ahead for others. Though Tidal might have made a good start by grabbing hold of exclusive content supply from some of the most renowned musicians, it is unlikely that the game would soon change its course when you consider Spotify’s strong internet marketing strategy.
Images: Tidal
______________________________________________________________________________
Tweak Your Biz is a thought leader global publication and online business community. Today, it is part of the Small Biz Trends stable of websites and receives over 300,000 unique views per month. Would you like to write for us?
An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
