Music streaming service Spotify has hit a winning streak. Not content with winning awards for its Web-based music-streaming service, it’s also set to take the mobile world by storm, firstly with a Spotify app for Android phones (above, and in the video below) and the iPhone, and now with a dedicated Spotify phone.
Most companies are happy enough with just a smartphone app to add to their Web app, but Spotify figures that it might as well go the whole hog and build an entire phone around its service. And why not? If Twitter and Facebook can do it, then surely the world’s most talked about music streaming service can too?
But a Spotify phone won’t just shake up the mobile phone world – it’ll shake up Starbucks, too. Read on after the jump to see how…
Spotify Phone Rumours
The Spotify phone hasn’t been officially announced yet, but the rumours surrounding its development are strong, and it makes genuine business sense. The rumours themselves started when the chairman of Hutchison Whampoa, Li Ka-Shing, bought a stake in Spotify.
Never heard of him? He’s the guy who built a huge mobile network in the UK before selling it to France Telecom for billions. That mobile network was Orange. Not content with doing it once, he did it again, building the Three network across Europe.
After that, he bought INQ, the small mobile phone manufacturer that specialises in phones that tightly integrate with socially-oriented web apps, such as Twitter, Facebook and Skype. Rounding off the rumour comes the latest news that INQ CEO Frank Meehan has just been appointed onto Spotify’s board.
So Spotify now has financial and managerial backing from a huge mobile operator capable of making its own mobile phones that just happen to specialize in socially-oriented Web apps. A Spotify-branded phone is all but inevitable!
Spotify Phone features
There are no details on the features of such a Spotify phone, of course, but that doesn’t stop us speculating!
For a taster, check out the video below of Spotify on an Android phone.
That’s pretty tasty in its own right. But a mobile Spotify has the potential to go much further than simply replicating the desktop experience.
Musical MobSharing
One of the first posts I wrote about on MobileMentalism was a concept I called mobsharing, in which phone users would connect to each other’s mobile phones within a small radius of a WiFi hotspot, such as Starbucks, and browse each other’s library of tunes, sharing the tunes that they liked.
I envisaged different areas and times of day becoming known as good places to hang out for certain styles of music. Starbucks at 5pm, for example, is usually filled with people coming home from work, and so the songs being shared would be very different from those being shared at 3:30pm, when it’s mostly filled by teenagers who’ve just finished school and should really be hanging around street corners drinking cheap cider instead.
If this ever took off, you might find yourself choosing one coffee shop over another simply because of the tunes being shared. Not only would you have access to music that fit your taste, but you’d also be surrounded by people with similar musical tastes to your own. It’s almost guaranteed to be the perfect social meeting point for you, even if you’re surrounded by complete strangers. After all, you know you have at least music in common.
This idea was unlikely to take off while MP3s were being “illegally” shared across mobile phones, and with the ridiculous copy protection schemes the music labels tried to put in place, the idea was dead in the water.
But Spotify doesn’t share music files; it shares playlists and streams the music to you. You never own the tune itself, just the playlist, yet you always have access to it. The majors like it and so do the people, so it’s win-win.
So now, four years after I wrote that post, musical mobsharing just might catch on. And if it does, it’ll change your local Starbucks forever in the process!
This is how it could work..
Musical Mobsharing and the Social Starbucks, thanks to the Spotify Phone
You arrive at Starbucks and check your Spotify phone. You set it to open mode, so other people can see your playlists. The tunes in your playlists are added to everyone else’s in the room, and your phone shows you all the tunes that the people around you are sharing. You therefore get an insant snapshot of the music tastes of the people around you.
You’re free to take other people’s tunes, of course, and add them to your Spotify Starbucks playlist. And so will everyone around you, all sharing hundreds of tunes over their cappucinos.
If Starbucks were really smart, they’d encourage this by setting up a TV that displayed the most popular tunes being shared, and even played them over the shop’s speakers. The mood of Starbucks would therefore directly reflect the musical tastes of its customers at any given time.
Of course, this would also attract other users from the immediate area who also liked the music, as they could hear what was being played, and might drift in if the music also matched their taste.
One extra step would be for Starbucks to provide a Twitter stream and Facebook account for people of that specific Starbucks shop to communicate with each other using their phones. Before you know it, the whole coffee shop would be communicating with each other in a virtuous social circle.
It’s only a small step from there before they start actually talking to each other!
Rather than the usual doom and gloom headlines of how social networks are reducing our friendships to shallow imitations of what we’ve traditionally known, the online networks will be used to enhance our physical network of friends by getting us to talk to people we’d never talk to normally.
Utopian, perhaps, but a real glimpse of the power that socially-inspired Web apps such as Spotify can bring to the real world if people started thinking outside of the box and stopped seeing the virtual and physical worlds as two distinct entities. It’s the mobile phone that can bring the two together, and enlightened companies such as Spotify, INQ, and maybe even Starbucks that could act as the catalyst.
Will it happen? Almost certainly. It’s almost too good an opportunity to miss. When it will happen is the real question. Spotify already have a service where you can phone up and make suggestions. Phone them up now and demand they make the world’s first Musical Mobsharing service! =
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In the U.S., where you’re pretty much expected to own some sort of mobile device, eMarketer marked that this year there are 280.8 million mobile phone subscribers, coming out to 91.4% penetration. The analysis expects to see that number increase steadily over the next few years, approaching complete market penetration in 2013, when it predicts 96.7% market penetration, or 308.7 million mobile phone subscribers.
Despite its growth in recent years, due to falling costs and improving usability, mobile Internet is still a young technology only utilized by 73.7 million people, or 26.3% of mobile phone subscribers. Only in the past year has mobile Internet usage penetrated through to one in four mobile users. Costs should continue to drop steadily, usability will likely only get better, and usage will also rise, but slowly. Hitting 50% penetration is not too far off, according to eMarketer, which predicts 43.5% penetration in 2013, when about 134.3 million mobile subscribers should be going on the Internet through their phones.
If you doubt this, we would entreat you to travel to the remotest of any of the ten regions in Ghana where you will find a plethora of ordinary charcoal, food and porridge sellers, Grannies and Grandpas, all using a mobile phone. This growth of technological gadgetry can only tell us that within Ghanaian culture mobile phones have become a basic necessity.