7digital Blog

Vice President of North America Vickie Nauman reports from CES 2011:
Nauman joined Toshiba Europe for a media event announcing the launch of their Music Place inside Toshiba laptops and devices, all powered by 7digital.

Toshiba's mini NB550D netbook

The CES show is sizable – over 150,000 attendees this year and the show floor is packed with the latest in headphones, tablets, speakers, mobile phones, apps, 3d television, games, surround sound, and gadgets gadgets gadgets.  It’s a very busy schedule meeting with a wide mix of companies who are looking to integrate 7digital into their products.

In between meetings I’ve had a chance to walk the show floor — got a first look at BlackBerry’s tablet, which is sleek and likely to be a big hit.  I also experienced a new type of home theatre – 3d flat screen with glasses and furniture wired with vibrations of sound from the film!  Not sure I’ll be putting that in my living room, but fun to see all the companies pushing the boundaries of tech and entertainment!

Future of Music Policy Summit

Vickie Nauman, our VP of North America participated in a lively and well-attended panel debating the legal, business issues and consumer interest in ‘music in the cloud’.

This annual event brought together some of the best minds and performers in music, policy, and technology.  Panel and workshop discussions were focused on emerging and ongoing issues around our industry’s transition to the digital economy, and the underlying copyright and legal structures that affect artists, content owners, services, and technology platforms.   Among the highlights were producer/musician T Bone Burnett and OK Go’s Damian Kulash, as well as Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts – all are one-on-one interviews on stage and can be found on the Future of Music blog link below.

Panel – Partly Sunny with a Chance of Fog: Forecasting “Music in the Cloud”

The panelist were:

Brendan Benzing Chief Product Officer, Rhapsody International
Peter Jenner Manager, Sincere Management
Steve Marks Executive Vice President and General Counsel, RIAA
Vickie Nauman VP North America, 7digital
Patrick Sullivan President and CEO, RightsFlow, Inc.
Rob Pegoraro Consumer Technology Columnist, The Washington Post (moderator)

Read more at Future of Music event website: http://futureofmusic.org/events/future-music-policy-summit-2010

Event summary blog and videos: http://futureofmusic.org/blog/2010/10/07/another-spectacular-summit

At yesterday’s 7digital update event we announced our partnership with Samsung to power their Music Hub service on the newly released GALAXY Tab tablet.

Samsung GALAXY Tab

The Music hub is a native Android application built by Samsung using 7digital’s open API platform.  Users can search, discover, preview, purchase and download tracks via the store’s unique, graphically rich on-screen interface.  It has been developed on the Android 2.2 operating system and the service will be available in 30 European countries and North America.

“The partnership with 7digital has enabled Samsung to create a digital music experience tailored to meet the needs of GALAXY Tab users,” according to Samsung.  “The power of 7digital’s open APIs combined with their extensive music catalogue instantly gives  GALAXY Tab users access to one of the most comprehensive music services in the world, allowing  them to quickly and easily search, discover, preview and purchase tracks and albums directly on their GALAXY Tab.”

The store application will be pre-installed on devices in 30 European countries and North America.  Tracks are available in the MP3 format with the standard format being 320kbps MP3.

Read the full press release.

On the 31st floor of the Centre Point building in central London we held our annual update event today.

Ben Drury, 7digital’s CEO, outlined a number of exciting announcements, not only our portfolio of mobile apps and services, but also new partnerships from the Consumer Electronics market.

Ben provided a review of the last 12 months, we have been busy, here are some of the headlines:

• We now have coverage in 30 countries
• Over 11m tracks in our catalogue
• HMV took a 50% stake in 7digital last year
• HMV Digital, powered by 7digital,  launched in the UK and Canada
• Launched ebook delivery for Waterstone’s.  We can process and deliver ePUB and PDF files
• New partners over the past 12 months include Spotify, Virgin Mobile (Canada), Winamp, Pure and many more.

Joining Ben on stage was Mark Oliver, Chief Executive of O&O who provided an overview of the media and technology market, and the

Ben Drury speaking to the audience about the amazing year 7digital has had.

emerging trends as we transition from web 1.0 to 2.0, outlining the steps the market is taking – an acceleration in technology (Moore’s law doesn’t seem to apply any more!), the macro revenue challenge and the impact on content as we  move to greater connectivity across multiple devices and platforms.

Also joining Ben was Graeme Simons, Business Manager, Digital Products at Toshiba.  Graeme provided an overview of the Toshiba Folio tablet and the music service 7digital is powering.

Today was about new announcements, and we had a lot of them.  Again, here are the headlines:

• The brand new Samsung GALAXY Tab music hub is powered by the 7digital API.  We genuinely feel the GALAXY Tab is a real contender against the iPad
• Toshiba’s new Folio 100 tablet has the the 7digital API at the heart of its music service
• We are now O2′s digital music partner for the UK across multiple platforms – PC, mobile and connected devices.

But it’s not all about tablet PCs and smartphones, recently Pure announced its FlowSongs music service for its Internet radios, such as the Sensia.  It too uses our API along with Shazam’s to create a unique identify, tag and buy service.

There was an update on the BlackBerry app we launched last year.  We are the number 1 music store on BlackBerry, we now have over 500,000  installs, the app is available  in 20 countries,  it supports touchscreen and keyboard models and we are now in a partnership with Shazam.

But we no longer just have the BlackBerry app.  Ling Khor, 7digital’s Consumer Product Manager, joined the stage to formally announce a new raft of mobile services which means we now have the most comprehensive mobile offering in the market.  First was our mobile optimised web store, which is a browser based service accessible on most modern phones as it is mobile OS agnostic, is HTML5 forward compatible for previewing music clips in the browser, scales for tablets and allows users to access their previously purchased tracks.  Available today at http://m.7digital.com

We also launched our Android app, which is available in the Android market today.  Like our BlackBerry app you can choose whether to download over the air or via Wi-Fi, browse, download and play your 7digital purchases.  It also scales up for use on Android tablets, such as the Samsung GALAXY Tab.

We also briefly previewed our new 7digital.com site, which is currently undergoing significant development.  More information will become available over the coming months.

Everything we demonstrated today at the event is built on 7digital’ s open API architecture.  We’ve seen a massive increase  in the use of our API. There are now over 120 active clients and we’re close to 50 million hits on the API per month and it continues to  grow!  We believe in openness and we believe that great value will be created by giving a broad range companies and individuals access to the world’s music in a structured and licensed basis. We want to enable the next Spotify or Last.fm to exist without having to burn through tens of millions of pounds.  For more information on our API visit the developer site.

Just one more thing… a look at the future.

Image recognition mixed with search technology has been around for some time now and we’ve recently been working on our own implementation with Mobile Acuity. Mark Unsworth, Commercial and Strategic Product Manager, outlined the new product which is based on top of the 7digital API and is an Android based application that allows users to take a photograph with a smartphone or tablet and have the album details returned back to the device.  Now, we know this has already been done with CD covers, but we’ll go one better, by allowing users to be able to listen to the preview clips from that album.

But we still wanted to think a bit bigger and we think that we can make music advertising more interactive by allowing users to use magazines, billboards, fly posters and bus hoardings to find music and then purchase it.  More on this soon!

Well, that was this year’s's event.  We’ll see you next year!

Ben Drury, CEO of 7digital, is taking part in the panel discussion ‘Battle for the Living Room‘ at this year’s In the City event in Manchester, UK.

The panel will be discussing how all our media needs might be met by one box in the living room, and how it will give users whatever they want, whenever they want it: TV, film, music, games, internet, pictures, words…But who will emerge as the dominate players and how do we make it all work for the consumer?

Ben will be joined by a number of  leading figures from the world of digital media, including Ted Cohen Managing Partner TAGStrategic, Gary Clay EMEA Marketing Manager XBOX and Pete Downton Director Connected Services, Imagination Technologies.  The panel takes place on Wednesday 13th October, 1.15PM – 2.15PM.

7digital are pleased to support In the City by sponsoring this panel discussion.

For more information about In the City visit http://www.inthecity.co.uk

7digital's 'Team IFA' relaxing after a hard day of meetings: James, Jim, Dan and Stephen.

Nothing can prepare you for the scale of IFA, the consumer electronics trade show now celebrating it’s 50^th year in Berlin. If I tell you it was huge or enormous or really, really big it doesn’t quite do it justice.  Whatever you are imagining now is much smaller than it actually is.

It is vast.  Even if it weren’t full to the brim with buyers, sellers, members of the public and journalists, and were totally empty it would take a couple of hours to walk round it all.  It’s hard to imagine what other conferences could fill it.

Apparently one of them is Fruit Logistica, a fruit and vegetable exhibition, which bafflingly, is on a similar scale.  Presumably Apple, BlackBerry and Orange are all in attendance there.

No Apple at IFA though, but plenty of response to the iPad. The Samsung GALAXY Tab was a very hot topic, which was great news for 7digital, given our music store’s position on the tablet. We watched consumers interacting with the store on display devices, which is always heartening, especially when the execution is as good as it is on that device.

As well as meeting with existing partners, it was good to meet with a whole host of new partners and talk about new opportunities with them. Having ebooks in our portfolio of services is an enormous help, as the current tablet mania has great implications for ebooks.

When can I have one? James of 7digital with a Samsung GALAXY Tab

While tablets were a huge talking point for us at 7digital, there was a mammoth amount of noise about 3d televisions. Some CE brands were so keen to push 3D they didn’t have any audio devices on display. Every room seemed to have acrobats, jugglers and the like performing on stage, broadcast live to banks of 3D TVs where huge groups of people would watch them through special glasses, rather than taking them off to see the real thing. I understand why this is, but it did look pretty absurd  to a passer by.

Whether consumers really want 3D just yet is open to question. There’s precious little content, and most have upgraded to flat panel pretty recently. The glasses seem to be one of the biggest obstacles, and you might be tempted to think the whole concept could go the way of the mini-disc if it weren’t for the fact that it has clear and immediate implications for gaming where the issue will be much less of a barrier.

Sharp's glasses-free 3D Tablet. Available sometime soon!

If the no-glasses-required 3D technology improves and takes off, it could have some pretty wild implications for tablets. Sharp already have a 3D tablet, which with the addition of motion control being demoed on some TV’s, really set the mind racing about how 3D user interfaces could work in the future.

But back to the present: the other clear trend was for connected devices, especially TV’s and the requirement for cloud based media services, which for  7digital is a very good news indeed.

The opening day of IFA in Berlin, the leading consumer electronics trade show, saw the launch of a genuine challenger to the iPad, Samsung’s  GALAXY Tab.

To the right, Ben Drury CEO of 7digital

Powered by Android  2.2, the Samsung GALAXY Tab is the first of the company’s tablet devices.  The GalaxyTab allows consumers to experience PC-like web-browsing and enjoy all forms of multimedia content on the perfectly sized 7-inch display, wherever they go. Moreover, users can continuously communicate via e-mail, voice and video call, SMS/MMS or social network with the optimized user interface.

We believe the GALAXY Tab is a real contender to Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s experience as a leading consumer electronics company puts it in a strong position to help deliver a true ‘connected life’ experience.

At 7digital we are extremely proud to be associated with the GALAXY Tab with the 7digital music store deeply embedded in the device via the Samsung Music Hub.  Users of the Galaxy Tab will have access to 7digital’s store of over 10 million MP3 tracks across many countries.  What is even more exciting is that our existing over 2 million customers will automatically have access to their accounts and music collection via the GALAXY Tab, making the transition to a mobile device even easier.

Watch the video courtesy of Android Central: Click here

Find out what some of the blogs are saying:

Read the Samsung press release – Click here