7digital Blog

SXSW 2011 was a busy seven days for 7digital!
VP of North America Vickie Nauman attended both the Interactive and Music portion of SXSW and had the great pleasure of talking to start ups, consumer electronics companies RIM and Toshiba, artist-to-fan services, live performance social apps, music discovery services, gaming companies, and streaming services who are all using the 7digital platform. “Music has become so complex that it doesn’t make sense for most companies to do their own licensing or set up a secure platform, especially if they want a broad international service. All of these innovative companies are instead focusing on creating their own best in class user experience, and relying on 7digital’s API to take care of the rest,” Nauman commented.

Once the Music portion of SXSW began, Nauman was joined by Anna Siegel, who manages the US and Canadian 7digital.com stores. She met with labels and artists throughout the week and had the opportunity to film interviews and performances for the site. SXSW Music always proves to be a spectacular setting for new music discovery, particularly fostered by the label and distributor day showcases of new artists. Recorded music was not forgotten by Sony Music Group, who invited 7digital for a lovely preview listening session of their exciting upcoming releases. 7digital partnered up with the UK Trade and Investment to host an official SXSWi showcase at the British Music Embassy and enjoyed a Great British Breakfast in Austin. While the interactive portion of the festival continues to outgrow the music portion – bringing many new faces and discussions to the event – companies that bridge the two fields are finding new ways to interact with potential partners and existing contacts. This was encouraged by two very successful music tech meet-ups held by Rdio and Topspin. Jack White was out and about promoting the legacy of physical album sales through his mobile records store van, spotted by the 7digital team one late night in Austin.

Vickie Nauman spoke on two panels – one SXSW Interactive panel with British innovator ARM, discussing the future of mobile payments, and another called “Music Plus Devices – What Works?” during SXSW Music, which included representatives from Toshiba, Sonos, and Qualcomm. This was a great discussion about the importance and complexity around enabling music in your favorite laptop, smart phone, or tablet. With these panel speakers we heard examples of what it takes to make a successful partnership between digital content services, mobile, car and home devices, and platforms in a positive discussion about the future of the music business.

Quote from Brian Foster (Sr Mgr Business Dev, Alliances Mktg Toshiba America) during the panel, “There are three criteria for a good partnership between a consumer electronics and a music company – First, you need a solution consumers want – and people want music. Second, you want to work with a company that is well-established in the market – 7digital is working with Toshiba in all of our key territories. Third, you want a partner with a lot of proven experience and expertise.”

Link to Music Plus Devices audio: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_MP6721
Vickie Nauman’s panelist profile: http://sxsw.com/node/6744

Vickie’s favorite live performances of SXSW 2011: The Black Angels (big dark rock sound from Austin TX), The Soundtrack of our Lives (Sweden), Bright Light Social Hour (amazing 20 year olds from Austin channeling psychedelic garage rock), supremely infectious performers Fitz and the Tantrums (from Silver Lake’s Dangerbird Records), The Naked and Famous (New Zealand), Alejandro Escovedo and his full orchestra, DeVotchKa in the new ACL Live hall, Duff McKagan’s acoustic set, North Mississippi All Stars, Charles Bradley, Surfer Blood, Chapel Club, Jonquil, and finally… a brand new discovery, San Diego’s Dynamite Walls.

Anna’s favorite live performances of SXSW 2011: Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, Yuck, Dirty Beaches, La Sera, Charles Bradley, Toro Y Moi, Chikita Violenta (Mexico), Francisca Valenzuela (Chile), Bun B w. Erykah Badu, James Blake (UK), Mother Mother (Canada), The Chapin Sisters, Khaira Arby (Mali) and Charles Bradley.

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.

We’ve just released a new version of the 7digital app for Android. With version 1.5  you can now listen to your local music library as well as sync your previously purchased 7digital music on the go.

New features include:

• Play your local music library (import local music from your phone)
• Last.fm scrobbling direct from your mobile device
• Use headphone controls with the 7digital player
• A landscape display for the player
• The option to set the 7digital player as the default media player on your Android device
• Sort music by purchase date, date downloaded and by A-Z for albums and artists within the player
• Improved sync and download performance
• Improved overall responsiveness

The 7digital Android application is free to download directly from the Android Market and requires Android 2.1 or higher.

Stay tuned for more updates coming soon!

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!

The 7digital developer blog is now live, check it out.