This week brought about a few interesting news items in the realm of digital music. First, came the news via Forbes that Facebook – in conjunction with Spotify, a European-based music streaming service – will launch a music service, potentially within the next two weeks. The collaboration with Spotify will add the capability to seamlessly share music and listen socially, much like the existing functions for photos, videos, and events. One question mark remains the ability for the service to launch in the United States, as Spotify is still in negotiations with Universal and Warner. Currently, the service is offered throughout Europe in Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Facebook’s ability to stream music will also fulfil a long-held dream of Mark Zuckerberg, who was working on a music streaming service around the same time he was first developing Facebook in the dorm rooms of Harvard. Zuckerberg, who has publicly professed his admiration for Spotify, launched a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called Wire Hog in 2004, which was designed to sit on top of Facebook like a software application. Sean Parker allegedly killed the service, which was thought to be ahead of its time.
Next, Jeff Bezos and Amazon took a guerrilla approach to chipping away at market share from iTunes when they offered a one day only download of Lady Gaga’s new album Born This Way for just 99 cents. According to Digital Music News, Amazon tweeted the offer to over 1.5 million followers, who subsequently crashed the Amazon servers with overwhelming demand.
So, file this one under ‘go big or go home,’ but make no mistake, this comes with a serious price tag. Indeed, this is part of the culture created by Jeff Bezos, though the real question is whether fans are sticking with iTunes for reasons other than price. Let’s see.
Finally, we mentioned a couple weeks ago the collaboration between the Library of Congress and Sony to provide the National Jukebox, which gives listeners free streaming access to over 10,000 historical recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Today, the Wall Street Journal ran a story highlighting the overwhelming success of the project in its first weeks.
In the first two days more than a million people logged on; within a week, visitors had racked up 600,000 plays. Listeners can play individual tracks or precompiled playlists, or assemble their own.
No wonder people are so interested: The first 25 years of the 20th century represent the birth of jazz, the blues, the Broadway musical, the big band, country music, pop singing and the Great American Songbook, not to mention a golden age of opera and a flowering of ethnic music. Superstars from the era still loom large: Enrico Caruso, Al Jolson, Bessie Smith.
