REVOLVER:'Subscription Restricted. This is the message that greets you when you try to join Sky Songs – the latest, greatest, most up-to-datest legal music download/streaming package. As with everything, "Eire" lags behind such hotspots as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The service is due to launch in Ireland next year.
It’s all rather annoying, as Sky Songs really does look like it has squared the circle in the music subscription/streaming stakes.
Of course BSkyB would want a piece of the music-download market. The company has been working away for a few years on a definitive “iTunes killer” service, but had to do a bit of quick updating when Spotify came out of nowhere to reshape the musical landscape. Sky Songs is a neat and tidy mix of iTunes and Spotify.
With the major record labels and big indies on board, Sky Songs already has four million tracks up on the service. As much emphasis is put on back catalogue titles as new releases. If you search for a song and they haven’t got it, they do their best to upload it within days.
Unlike Spotify, Sky Songs has no free option (though Spotify’s free service is not available in Ireland). Sky Songs has just two subscription packages. The first, priced £6.49 (€7.11) a month, allows you to download a “£6.49 album” or 10 individual tracks and to stream as much music as you want.
The second option, at £7.99, gets you 15 tracks – or a “premium” album – and unlimited streaming. Obviously, the U2s and the Coldplays will be priced at the higher rate, and newer artists at the lower one. If you want to download more than your allocated amount, additional tracks are 65 pence each.
Sky Songs offers a few advantages over Spotify. First, it is web-based, which means those utterly joyless companies that block en masse employee’s access to YouTube, Spotify, etc won’t be able to prevent this getting through. Second, if you’re the sort of geek who compiles special “playlists”, you can build up all the special categories you want – and use the heart icon to indicate a special favourite.
Perhaps of more interest is the editorial that the service will carry. Sky Songs is linked with Popjustice and Holy Moly!, the best music- related websites in the UK, to provide up-to-the-minute irreverent coverage of the music world. Finally, it undercuts Spotify’s monthly subscription fee of £9.99.
In several senses, then, Sky Songs appears to have the upper hand on Spotify, but it is quite typical for start-ups like this to operate as loss-leaders for the first year or so. Whether Sky will keep its current subscription rates or tinker with them in the future remains to be seen.
The bigger question is how Sky will develop this service (and it certainly has the deep pockets and the RD people in place). If Sky Songs makes the move from being not just a PC service but something that is bundled into your set-top box, it could increase its users exponentially.
On paper then, everything is hunky-dory, and the pricing scheme here really puts it up to Spotify. If this means a pricing war, then all the better for the consumer.
Ultimately, though, Sky Songs is another step in converting us away from the habit of paying for each track or album, and towards a subscription model.
We have still to reach the even simpler model of having all music bundled for free into your broadband deal (which would end all the stupid talk and threats that have made the current debate about music downloading so very tedious) but with a major media player such as Sky embracing the subscription service, that journey time can only have been shortened.
