7digital Blog

London, UK and Waterloo, ON – Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) and 7digital today announced that the 7digital Music Store will come pre-installed* on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™.

The 7digital Music Store will give BlackBerry PlayBook users access to 7digital’s catalogue of over 13 million high quality (320kbps) MP3s. BlackBerry PlayBook users will be able to search for tracks, albums and artists and preview tracks before making a purchase. Users can also discover new music through 7digital’s recommendation technology. Prices for BlackBerry PlayBook users will match the prices on 7digital.com, with individual tracks and albums priced in a customer’s local currency.

Ben Drury, CEO 7digital comments, “We’re really excited to be working with RIM to bring the 7digital experience to the BlackBerry PlayBook. RIM has created an incredible tablet with premium multimedia features and together we are delivering a truly exceptional music experience for mobile users, offering content that is extremely easy to discover, purchase and use.

“We currently have the largest international footprint of any MP3 digital music seller and we look forward to expanding our business with RIM throughout the year.”

“The 7digital Music Store is a perfect complement to the high-performance BlackBerry PlayBook, providing users with fast searches and downloads, and a slick interface that makes it very easy to discover, purchase and enjoy music,” said Alistair Mitchell, Vice President, BBM Platform & Integrated Services. “We are thrilled to be working with 7digital to provide BlackBerry PlayBook users with access to an amazing catalog of 13 million tracks.”

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet running the 7digital Music Store application will be previewed this week at the South by South West conference in Austin, Texas.

London, UK, 15th February 2011: 7digital today announced a partnership with Mobile Acuity to create an integrated Visual Music Discovery service.

Using the Visual Music Discovery service, developers, record labels and service providers can offer their users the ability to discover music featured on CD covers, posters, billboards and other visual advertising mediums, by capturing images with their mobile devices. For example, a user can take a photo of an outdoor poster or magazine advert and get instant access to information about the music or artist featured, before previewing, purchasing and downloading music to their mobile device.

The new service has been created using 7digital’s application programming interface (API), which has been combined with Mobile Acuity’s image recognition technology. The integration with the 7digital API allows access to over 12 million high quality MP3 tracks.

The Visual Music Discovery service will be made available to 7digital partners, including major and independent record labels and consumer electronics brands, as well as the wider development community. As the service is being made available in API form, developers can easily integrate it into existing marketing and advertising campaigns.

Mark Unsworth, 7digital’s Strategic Product Manager, comments: “The speed and accuracy of Mobile Acuity’s image recognition technology mixed with 7digital’s extensive 12 million track catalogue is a fantastic partnership. This functionality is a great addition to our leading API, allowing developers and service providers to further integrate innovative music exploration and purchasing into their applications. Being able to immediately see, hear and even purchase the music that you are reading about in a magazine or see on a fly poster is a really engaging proposition for music lovers.”

Chris Wade, Executive Chairman at Mobile Acuity commented: “The partnership announced today is the next logical step in music discovery. We are all familiar with recognising music by its sound and now it’s possible to recognise music visually. Mobile Acuity’s mobile image recognition technology enables search in the way that is very easy and natural for users. Coupled with the world’s leading mobile digital music provider we have an invaluable offering for developers to build a whole new generation of music discovery products.”

Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain and London, UK, 14th February 2011 – 7digital announced the company is acting as Samsung’s official music download partner for the new Galaxy S II smartphone.

7digital will be the embedded digital music store on the Galaxy S II, allowing users to access 7digital’s 12 million strong catalogue of high quality MP3 tracks. The native Android application will be pre-installed on all Samsung Galaxy S II smartphones shipping to 30 countries including UK, US and Canada.

With the Android application, users can search for tracks, albums and artists and preview tracks before purchasing. Users can also discover new music through 7digital’s recommendation technology. Tracks and albums will be priced in a customer’s local currency, with prices mirroring those on 7digital.com.

7digital has been incorporated into the Galaxy S II using the 7digital API (application programming interface), which allows consumer electronics companies and developers to build and integrate bespoke digital music download stores into a range of devices and services. The music download application on Samsung’s existing Galaxy Tab device is powered using the 7digital API.

Ben Drury, CEO 7digital comments, “The new Galaxy S II has been designed with entertainment at its core. The integration of 7digital makes discovering, previewing and purchasing high quality MP3 music simple and intuitive for users. In addition to providing access to the 7digital catalogue, users will also have access to our recommendation services, and can preview tracks before downloading direct to their mobile device.

“We currently have the largest international footprint of any digital music MP3 retailer, with a presence in the UK, US, Canada and throughout Europe. This made us an ideal partner for Samsung, as we are able to serve their large global customer base and provide access to the largest MP3 catalogue in the world.”

What the press are saying:
PC World
Cnet reviews
Engadget

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!

“Music + software + hardware + art + the web. Anything goes as long as it’s music related.”  7digital participated in another weekend of hacking and experimentation around music and code.  We opened up our music platform along with some other great companies like The Echonest, Last.fm, Sound Cloud, Lyric Find and Songkick, just to name a few.  Developers converged near the MIT campus and had 24 hours to build mashups and applications.   7digital had five great hacks on our system and we gave a prize to Jeremy Sawruk who created FeedTunes – which takes popular music posts on Twitter, identifies them through MusiXMarch lyrics, matches to 7digital’s music catalog and makes a hot playlist!

Eliot Von Buskirk’s blog post summary and list of winners: http://evolver.fm/2010/10/17/boston-music-hack-day-winners-announced/

The Digital Music Forum West, Los Angeles, (Oct 6-7, 2010) brought together a blend of music labels, app and mobile developers, advertisers, services, and business leaders for two days of sometimes very heated debates about what is and is not working in digital music.   Highlights included keynote presenter Rick Alden, Founder and CEO of Skullcandy, who told the story of starting this audio company in his basement and how he has focused on the skateboard/snowboard community.

7digital’s VP of North America Vickie Nauman joined the panel to discuss how brands and music can effectively collaborate in the digital space.

How Brands Are Working with the Music Industry in the Digital Age

Panelists
Claes Loberg, CEO, Guvera
Adam Wolf, Senior Creative Director, pigFACTORY Music, USA
Jeff Bronikowski, Head of Music, Yahoo!
Tim Scanlin, CEO & Founder, Brandracket & BrandsForBands
Vickie Nauman, VP, North America, 7digital
Moderator: Syd Schwartz, Founder & CEO, Linchpin Dig

Event website: http://www.digitalmusicforum.com/west/

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!

We want to thank the organisers and all the amazing people who attended this weekend’s Music Hack Day in London.  You came up with some really cool hacks and you continue to astound us with you creativity and ingenuity.  Thanks to you all.

Congratulations goes to ‘Piracy’ who won the 7digital hack with ‘Track Dropper’, which they describe as – Think Geocaching for music… an android application allowing you to drop tracks from your music collection on your current location, and allowing others to pick them up if they are close enough.  To see it in action watch their video demo.

This is the first example of a hack making use of the latest integration between 7digital and The Echo Nest APIs.

Check out all the hacks and photographs from the event.

This weekend (4^th September, 2010) sees the return of Music Hack Day to the Guardian offices in London, where 200 music geeks will be challenged to experiment with building the next generation of music applications.

At this weekend’s event developers will have the first chance to take advantage of our partnership with The Echo Nest which brings the 7digital open API, offering the most extensive MP3 catalogue with comprehensive international rights together with The Echo Nest’s intelligent music application development platform. This is an exciting event for us to be involved with, and along with all the other companies taking part we hope to see more great and innovative music services created on top of the 7digital API.

We are looking forward to seeing all the developers over the weekend and wish them the best of luck.

Visit our developer site to find out more about our API.