If you think it’s a bit late in the day for anyone to launch a music service, you’d be right, but Sony, after repeated attempts at breaking back into the world of mobile music is about to make another run at this market and in particular hopes to break into the US, with a new music service built around a third partly monthly subscription offer under the Qriocity brand.
But buried inside the service is the key to Sony Ericsson’s existing success outside of the US with music phones and MP3 players. Regardless of the Touch UI and the iTunes store, Sony has always had the edge on music phones in its Walkman brand, when it comes to the actual music experience. It may not have sold so many, but that’s because the whole experience of its phones are perhaps inferior to the iPhone, but not, in our view the music side.
Behind its success are two ingredients, the Gracenote music fingerprint database, which Sony acquired in April 2008, but has used for far longer, which drives its MusicID service, as well as its own SenseMe music recommendation service and mood playlists. There are now copies of both these services on many handsets from others companies, but they are just that, copies. When the handset experience of the Walkman music is added to best of breed technology in music reproduction, even down to multiple patents in earbud construction, the Walkman experience was only ever let down by Sony Ericsson’s speed to get into touch screen phone designs.
Now these features are being put into a service which will shortly also be aimed at Android devices, handsets and Tablets, and that, we assume, means a Walkman app for handsets, which will drive this Sony Music Unlimited service aggressively up against iTunes.
The background to this service can be quite confusing, but way back in February 2007 a group of 23 cellcos, with a combined subscriber base of what must now be close to 800 million, took the UK Omnifone music service, called MusicStation, which now has access to most major music labels, in Europe and Asia. Initially it only launched with music from one or two labels, but since then it has added a whole batch of them. Later Sony Ericsson split its music services in the region and offered both its own PlayNow Arena (a la carte purchased music like iTunes) and also the PlayNow Plus branded subscription version of MusicSation.
Now Sony proper, not just Sony Ericsson, has integrated the MusicStation service with the Qriocity download service from Sony, by integrating it with the two key ingredients of Walkman music ‘ Gracenote and SenseMe.
What SenseMe does on a phone is it creates not just a fingerprint to identify music (you can hold a Gracenote powered phone up to absorb any music you hear, and it will then locate and play the track to you using its fingerprint database) but it will also categorize your music in terms of genre, beat and instruments using Sony’s proprietary 12 Tone Analysis technology to evaluate music tracks, a bit like a low end version of Music Genome style analysis. Pick any single track and click the SenseMe button on a phone, and it will find all tracks on that phone with the same Mood. Taking that one step further, this Cloud Service can search all 6 million tracks and offer you all the music of similar mood.
This will now be launched for not just a handful of Sony Ericsson phones which have always had similar options, but for every connected Bravia TV and Blu-ray player and of course the PS3 and any PC.
Vodafone successfully used MusicStation to stave off losses to the iPhone when O2 had the iPhone exclusively in the UK and Sony is dressing this up as a subscription offering on its existing Qriocity service.
Omnifone began life with partnerships deals with operators in Australia, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the UK and has spread its services widely since then. In fact if most countries have four cellular operators, and Apple was honoring only one of them with an exclusive to the iPhone, all the others needed an across the board music service and this has been well positioned to take that job on, on every type of phone ‘ 2G, 3G and beyond.
Sony is calling this option “Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity,” but as far as we can see it’s actually powered partly by Omnifone and partly by Gracenote and we’re not even sure it sits on the Qriocity network. Sony describes it as cloud based, because it streams form a remote sever, and cites major labels including UMG, Sony Music, Warner Music and EMI as well as independent labels ‘ virtually the same music that iTunes has.
The service will also become available on a wide range of Sony’s own portable music players and Sony Ericsson handsets, but interestingly it’s also available on Android based mobile devices and other Android based devices, such as Tablets.
The service is in launch mode now but of course can be sold as an upgrade to all those existing cellco agreements on MusicStation and has already been launched under the Music Unlimited name in the UK and Ireland and will roll out in the US, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand throughout this year.
What MAY have happened is that Sony saw all these possibilities from day one and has helped Omnifone get its licensing act together, leveraging off Sony’s own major record label. It has then worked with Omnifone to integrate the service either onto its own servers, or at least to sync with a software download to all Sony devices, and later to a wider range of devices, which means that cellcos can put this on any Android phone.
‘Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity’ represents several years of development and licensing investment by Omnifone on behalf of Sony to produce the first Cloud-based music service which will work on Sony’s network connected devices, as well as a wide range of Android-based products from other brands,” added Rob Lewis, Executive Chairman of Omnifone. “Our partnership with Sony will bring compelling legitimate digital music access to the homes and living rooms of millions of consumers worldwide.”
If you have music on your phone, the service simply notes what tracks you have and creates them as a series of playlists on the service, it can then spawn recommendations or mood lists purely from your existing music, showing you similar music that you may never had heard of. If one of the new tracks it recommends or simply plays to you is something you like, we expect you can just buy it there and then on a single button push, and if you don’t want to buy it, the phone can use it as the basis of a cloud based playlist any time you are in the same mood.
‘We are pleased to be supporting a service that will be bringing such unique and seamless accessibility to music content for consumers around the globe,” said Craig Palmer, Gracenote president. “‘Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity serves as a perfect platform for our recognition and discovery technologies, which will allow music fans to experience what they want to hear, wherever and whenever they want.”
Gracenote’s database already provides the backbone for many existing music services and has music and video metadata and licensed cover art images for 100 million tracks and eight million albums and its database processes around 5.5 billion queries per month from 250 million users.
Sony is slowly building its Qriocity brand around the world, with half an eye on a breakthrough in the US. It began offering Video On Demand powered by Qriocity in the US in April last year and has now moved that service to France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. This allows customers to rent Hollywood blockbuster movies across every Sony device launched in 2010 including connected Bravia TV, Blu-ray Disc player and Blu-ray Disc Home Theater systems.
‘As we start to expand Qriocity globally, these services ‘powered by Qriocity’ offer a single ID log-in and wallet solution, and empower users to easily consume content including music and video across a growing number of integrated devices,” said Kazuo Hirai, President of Networked Products & Services Group, Sony Corporation.
The service comes in two versions Basic for around $6 a month and a Premium version at $15, and the basic plan offers all the music, and the premium adds extra selection features.