7digital Blog

Back once again for another installment of the weekly Music + Tech Round-Up and this week has been pretty fruitful, but before we dive in to our tech-leaning revelations let’s tuck into the music, with one of our all-time favourite record labels.

Label of love: Rough Trade

For the first round-up of this month we’re kicking things off with our label of love, the London-born, legendary Rough Trade. It is an imprint to which we could pretty much ascribe the emergence of the indie movement as we know it today, having nurtured the careers of acts such as Scritti Politti, The Smiths, and later, The Libertines. Established in 1978 by Geoff Travis just two years after he opened the record store just off Ladbroke Grove in west London, Rough Trade was built upon punk’s DIY ethos, and an open and liberal manifesto, for which their eclectic back catalogue of reggae, punk, post-punk and electronica, is much owed. Since then, Rough Trade has heralded some of today’s most-prized indie artists and bands and we have some great offers on their catalogue, from just £4.49. Dig in!

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As our CEO, Ben Drury, is on the cover of the Mobile Marketing Magazine this month, we thought it was a good time to talk about mobile apps. The last few weeks have seen a surge of music focused apps, covering everything from viewing to videos and photos of One Direction through augmented reality, to accessing exclusive content from The XX. One even helps those listeners who are trying to get that little bit fitter before Christmas descends.

Terms like ‘innovation’ and ‘immersive experience’ are thrown around constantly. While we’re not huge fans of clichés, we are big fans of the concepts behind them.

Our favourite has been the 18 Months app from Calvin Harris, which provides Android and iOS users with the entire 18 Months album for free – but with a catch. You have to keep dancing if you want to hear the music. Once you stop dancing (or at least stop moving) so does the music, unless you fork out some cash for it. The idea is to get those fans who’ve brought a few singles to complete their album – and what better motivation to buy a dance album than to get people dancing. Tongue-in-cheek as it might be, it does address the decline in physical albums compared to growth digital album sales. It won’t work for everyone of course, but it’s a darn good idea.

The explosion of connected devices (which could be your TV, games console, or even a fridge if you fancy) is creating a previously unheard of choice for listening to your favourite artists and bands.

This is naturally good news for music fans, but it should be filling the hearts of developers and labels with joy too. Labels can do anything from encourage more track downloads to complete the digital album of a particular artist, to develop all new marketing and revenue streams. And to do this, they’ll need developers to create a new app, who’ll in turn bring in some cash for themselves.

There’s still plenty of room for good old fashioned tracks and albums, but it’s very encouraging to see the industry embracing some of the new opportunities and pushing app development forward.

“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/

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!

A few weeks ago we released the first version of our Android app. This app enables you to listen to high quality music on your phone, wherever you are. It also lets you access, browse and download your existing 7digital purchases. Here are the full specs:

• Access your 7digital music on the go
• Sync your 7digital music to your phone wirelessly
• No subscription required
• High quality MP3s (up to 320kbps)
• Integrated music player

Download the 7digital Android app directly to your phone from the Android Market or via the link below. For all the latest information and updates regarding our mobile devices, go to 7digital.com/mobile.

Download now