Posts tagged subscription
Rdio Launches Technical & Business Plan to Route Around Apple’s Subscription Fees
Mar 11th
Streaming music subscription service Rdio today announced availability of a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that outside developers can use to add playback of Rdio’s 8 million song catalog and social features like popular playlists to their web applications.
Developers that can sign up new subscribers to Rdio’s $5 or $10 per month paid services will receive a two to three percent commission for the lifetime of the subscriber. That could help create a small army of sales people that could sell Rdio in settings outside of the Rdio iPhone app, where Apple will soon begin taking a hefty 30% cut.
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Rdio subscribers will be able to listen to all the music in full through apps using the API, trial subscribers will be able to listen for 7 days and non-subscribers will hear short previews. How many apps will want to integrate music for subscribers to another service? As an Rdio subscriber myself, I hope a lot will.
Rdio is offering 3 types of APIs for the web: one based on the much-loved open OEmbed standard, a REST API and a Web Playback API. Playback APIs for iOS and Android apps are forthcoming, the company says. In other words, the functionality and affiliate sales are focused for now on web apps.
That makes the most sense from a financial perspective, but whether streaming music service subscriptions can be sold in large numbers through the web, instead of through in-app purchases on proprietary platforms like Apple’s iOS, will be a big determinant of the viability of this low-margin new business. Rdio makes no mention of Apple in its announcement, but given the industry’s intense focus on Apple’s controversial new plan to take a 30% cut from subscriptions sold on its platform – it’s hard not to consider an affiliate program for web-based sales of subscriptions in light of that.
It’s a bold experiment but it would be great if it worked. It would be even greater if a standards-based API play ended up being what helped innovative music startups thrive despite concerns about Apple’s stranglehold over mobile platforms.
Will web apps be able to generate a meaningful amount of interest in music that requires a subscription after 7 days? There’s not a whole lot of options otherwise for quick and easy integration of music streaming. “Ever since our launch six months ago our API has been our most requested feature,” says Todd Berman, VP of Engineering at Rdio. “Developers who have been looking for a way to integrate music into their web applications now have a way to do it easily, legally and accessibly. We’re also excited that our subscribers and the public will now be able to access Rdio content all over the web.”
The whole subscription streaming model still seems like an open question – I like it a lot myself but will it catch on generally? It’s hard to say. APIs for subscription streaming are a step even further out. It’s a bold experiment but it would be great if it worked. It would be even greater if a standards-based API play ended up being what helped innovative music startups thrive despite concerns about Apple’s stranglehold over mobile platforms.
Rdio’s APIs are built on top of the Mashery API management platform. (Disclosure: Mashery is a long-time sponsor of ReadWriteWeb.)
Below, Rdio’s new Mac desktop app, just released last week.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Fallout and Frustrations From Apple’s New Subscription Plan Continue
Feb 21st
Since announcing its new subscription plan last week, Apple’s move to collect a 30% cut of revenue has had raised the ire of a number of developers and commentators. Mike Melanson offered a round-up on some of the initial reactions, that ranged from “greedy” to “anti-competitive” to “Brilliant, Brazen or Batsh*t Crazy.
Apple’s 30% fee is posing problems for a number of companies and developers – those who’ve built their businesses around the existing rules, for example, and those who don’t have the margins to be able to hand over such a cut to Apple. Companies that have raised questions about the new policy run the gamut – music streaming services, e-book sellers, and software-as-a-service developers; big companies and startups alike.
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No Margin for That 30% Cut
The expletives that came from Last.fm co-founder Richard Jones last week may be one of the most colorful responses to Apple’s announcement, but his analysis speaks to the core of many developers’ concerns. Jones said in an IRC chatroom that “apple just f***ed over online music subs for the iphone.” Jones hinted that Apple may have plans to launch its own streaming service and is therefore attempting to squeeze out the competition. But whether that’s the case or not, he contends that “many services can’t survive a 30 percent loss of revenue.” Jones specifically mentions Spotify, reportedly poised to make its entry in U.S. markets, arguing that he can’t imagine its “margins are anywhere near 30 percent.”
Trouble for Alternative Funding Models
Readability just announced this morning that its iOS app had been rejected by Apple as the startup wasn’t running its service through the new subscription plan guidelines.
Readability offers a service whereby it redesigns Web pages – stripping out ads and resizing text, for example – in order to make online content more legible. Users pay a monthly subscription fee to use Readability, which in turn offers a unique funding model for publishers – the company gives them a 70% cut of the revenue from folks’ reading lists. “If we implemented In App purchasing,” writes Readability in an Open Letter to Apple, “your 30% cut drastically undermines a key premise of how Readability works.”
No Room in the Store for Big Catalogs
Jim Dovey, formerly the Apple Platforms Team Lead for the e-bookseller Kobo had raised another key stumbling block. As it currently stands, there’s a cap on the number of items you can sell via in-app purchases. According to Dovey, Apple’s “in-app purchasing system only allows 3000 or 3500 distinct items to be in your catalog (depending who you talk to). Kobo and Amazon each have around 2.5 million titles. Judging by the title of Kobo’s app, 1.8 million are public domain (or otherwise free), so some 700,000 are paid titles, which they are under obligation to the content owners to make available for sale to all their users.”
The dissatisfaction isn’t only coming from developers or companies who’ve invested in the Apple third-party ecosystem. PaidContent.org reports that anti-trust regulators are looking into Apple’s subscription plan. But in the meantime, angry developers are looking at their own alternatives.
As Readability notes in its blog post today, “To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.”
It seems likely that others will follow suit – putting their development efforts into the mobile web or into alternate operating systems (namely Android).
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
The New New Media: Apple’s Subscription Model
Jan 24th
Every Monday evening we’ll be looking at the latest in new media trends. The series is named after the title of one of my favorite books, The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. In that book, published in 1999, Lewis chronicled the dot com era startups that were attempting to re-make various industries. A similar upheaval is currently underway in traditional media – newspapers, magazines and book publishing. All are being radically overhauled by Web startups and tech giants like Apple and Google.
In today’s post, we look at Apple’s challenge to the magazine and newspaper industries. In particular, Apple is preparing a new subscription model for the App Store that will position it as a powerful intermediary between media publishers and consumers.
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Rumors of a subscription model for the App Store surfaced soon after the iPad was launched last year. Traditional magazines such as TIME showed immediate interest in the iPad, as a way to sell more magazines. Speculation was rife over Apple’s desire to be the gateway for consumers to subscribe to these publications.
However subscription functionality was withheld by Apple, which to this day does not allow publishers to directly bill their subscribers from within iTunes. Publishers have been forced instead to sell individual editions on the iPad, (poorly) mimicking the functionality of buying an app.
All was not lost for publishers wanting to pursue the subscription model, however. Apple left open the gate for publishers to re-direct users to their own websites in order to process subscriptions, which publishers such as The Economist duly did.
In the left screenshot above, users are prompted to subscribe from within The Economist’s iPad app. However when clicked, the subscribe button opens a browser window outside of the iPad (see image to the right).
Another option for publishers was to use Zinio, an online magazine shop which offers iPad subscriptions to magazine titles like Rolling Stone and National Geographic. However the Zinio user experience is not quite as good as a native iPad app like Wired. Plus Zinio is an intermediary for publishers too – and as an iPad app itself, it’s as reliant on Apple as the publishers are.
Apple can control apps like Zinio. But allowing publishers to directly control their iPad revenue stream even outside of their iPad apps proved troublesome to Apple, so it finally moved to close the gate a few months ago. All new apps that offer a subscription outside of iTunes now risk rejection by the App Store. Apps that currently re-direct users to their own websites to subscribe have until the end of June this year to shut off that functionality. Apple has asked app developers to "please submit an update that uses the In App Purchase API for purchasing content, by June 30, 2011."
So Apple is about to move into the subscription business in a big way. It’s expected to launch this model via a partnership with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which is developing an iPad-based newspaper called The Daily. There have been production delays with The Daily, though, which has forced Apple to delay its launch too.
Who is Apple’s subscription service good news for? Undoubtedly for consumers, who just want an easy and inexpensive way to subscribe to their favorite newspapers and magazines on the iPad.
Apple currently forces publishers like TIME to sell individual issues, instead of having a cost-effective subscription option.
For publishers it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand it will lead to increased readership, but on the other hand publishers will cede control over the subscription process and accompanying reader data to Apple. In its upcoming subscription model, Apple may or may not decide to share user data to publishers (it hasn’t so far, on individual issue sales). Also publishers will have little control over what revenue cut Apple will take, although it’s likely to be the same 30% it takes on the App Store.
Frédéric Filloux argues in Monday Note that Apple’s subscription service will be of much more benefit to small publishers, who will accept a relatively high revenue cut by Apple in exchange for outsourcing the technicalities of subscription.
For big publishers however, there remains a lot of fear over the control Apple will have over them. In a recent New York Times article, publishers like Hearst appeared to be pinning their hopes on alternative tablets – Android, Kindle and others. That seems like a vain hope though, as Apple has built up a considerable early lead in the tablet market for magazines.
When Apple does launch its subscription model alongside Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily, overall it will be a good thing for consumers and publishers alike. But it also means that another content industry will fall under Apple’s dictatorial governance, alongside the music business.
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Three Ways to Give Your Blog the SEO Treatment – MarketingProfs.com (subscription)
Dec 13th
 MarketingProfs.com (subscription) |
Three Ways to Give Your Blog the SEO Treatment
MarketingProfs.com (subscription) "Sometimes I hear the sound of crickets when I stumble across certain blogs written by small-business owners," writes Samantha McCormick at the OrangeSoda … |
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LimeWire Closes Online Store, Ends Plans for Legal Music Subscription Service
Dec 2nd
It appears as though a recent court decision forcing LimeWire to halt its P2P services is having a ripple effect to other parts of the company, as All Things Digital reports the site is closing its online music store at the end of the year and is abandoning its plans for a legal music download service.
The news wasn’t good for LimeWire back in October when a U.S. District Court Judge issued an injunction, forcing the P2P filesharing site to close down both the website and its client. And arguably, things went from bad to worse when a figure named MetaPirate took advantage of the open-source code for the client and recreated a Pirate Edition of LimeWire, causing both the RIAA as well as LimeWire to scramble to track him down. Those meddling kids.
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But according to Peter Kafka, other parts of the company are now closing shop as well. The home page of the LimeWire store announces that it’s no longer accepting customers. And the company has told vendors that the store will close on December 31. Kafka surmises that the company is trying to eliminate some of its remaining assets before the court decides early next year exactly how much it owes the music industry for copyright violations.
The company had long indicated it planned to launch a music subscription service, but those plans now seem unlikely as well. Considering such a project would require licensing agreements with the very businesses that have sought to shut LimeWire down, that’s not really a surprise. Once the world’s most-installed filesharing application, this looks to really be the end of LimeWire.
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New Chart: SEO Tactics for the B2B Marketer – MarketingSherpa.com (subscription)
Nov 9th
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New Chart: SEO Tactics for the B2B Marketer
MarketingSherpa.com (subscription) The size of the spheres in this chart indicates level of usage for each SEO tactic. As the spheres move to the right … |
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Open-Source Social Publishing Opens Doors for Marketers – MarketingProfs.com (subscription)
Sep 7th
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Open-Source Social Publishing Opens Doors for Marketers
MarketingProfs.com (subscription) Microsites, built quickly and easily refreshed with new content, are SEO magnets. They're good both for traffic and for your marketing reach. … |
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