REPOST: Streaming Music Service Aims To Choke Russian Piracy Problem

Music piracy in Russia has been killing industry sales for years. This article details how music streaming startup Zvooq is equipped to address this problem, with its business model echoing that of popular American music streaming service Pandora.

Music piracy has gotten so bad in Russia that the usual cease-and-desist approach just won’t cut it for major labels any more. In the spring, Sony Music Russia, Universal Music Russia, and Warner Music UK began a legal battle with Mail.Ru, the owner of Russia’s largest social network vKontakte, over accusations of “deliberately facilitating piracy on a large scale” on its social media site. Hearings are scheduled to begin on September eighth.

VKontakte is accused of letting users store and share copyrighted music without appropriate licensing agreements between the labels and the service.

 “We have repeatedly highlighted this problem over a long period of time,” Frances Moore, Chief Executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a statement last April.

“Music companies in Russia need a secure environment where they can invest in artists, offer new music to consumers and develop a viable business,” Leonid Agronov, CEO of NFMI, said in the same statement.

This week, a new streaming music service called Zvooq (Russian for “sound”) received $20 million in new funding to help create an attractive –and above all, legal– streaming music service for the Russian market.

The What and Why: 

 Zvooq bills itself as the music ecosystem designed for emerging markets with high piracy. This is how it differentiates itself from streaming competitors like Yandex.music and Deezer.

Zvooq’s argument is that music consumption is an experience, and that users come back to the experiences they find the most comforting. In other words, it’s not the availability of music that holds long-term value, but the experience with the music.

For example, illegal, unlicensed, or otherwise “pirated” content is widely available in Russia, but it comes with a pitiful experience for users. Pirate sites nest a single link to a downloadable archive among a minefield of fake links and advertisements. Any false click could link away to an advertiser’s site, or even worse, to something malicious.

Users are not in the habit of paying for their content, but are willing to trade a terrible experience for their desired content, as long as it’s free.

Zvooq utilizes an ad-supported freemium model similar to Pandora , and has a subscription tier that costs 199 Roubles per month, or roughly $5 USD. By providing an affordable, user friendly experience, it’s hoping it can provide Russian users an alternative to piracy.

It has more than 2.7 million registered users already, and has a number of high-profile partnerships with retailers, consumer electronics manufacturers, and wireless carriers.

According to IFPI, Russia has the potential to be a top ten digital music market if it can successfully shift away from a market dominated by piracy.

Disclosure by way of Anecdote

The Mp3 file extension was first released in the summer of 1995 as I was about to enter my senior year of high school. I spent that summer going to punk rock shows in basements and formed my own music group. My endeavours at musicmaking actually developed alongside the spread of mp3 culture and the maturation of millennial consumers. By my sophomore year of college, the band I was in had put a considerable amount of our time and money into releasing our own CD. We pressed 2000 discs, and went on tour to promote it across the country. In mid-1999, a person claiming that they had bought our CD at a street market in a small Russian town contacted us by email. 

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I dismissed it as a scam of some sort, since Nigerian 419 scams were quite prevalent at the time. Yet it didn’t end with that first message.

A few weeks later, another Russian email came in asking us if we could play a show in Saint Petersburg. I responded to this message with incredulity. Apparently this person had also purchased our CD in Russia, and believed we were of big enough renown to travel overseas.

I had no idea how our CDs had gotten there.

They said it wasn’t uncommon for brand new American music to turn up in Russia, but had no explanation of how our music could have gotten there in the first place. To this day, I still have no evidence that the discs were actually available in Russia other than a handful of emails from 1999-2002 saying “I saw your CD in [various Russian city names]“.

 I have always assumed someone in the U.S. ripped mp3s from a disc they bought, and shared them on the nascent peer-to-peer filesharing networks. This was the year Napster debuted, after all.

If the reach of Russian music pirates was long enough to touch even my unpopular band of late-90′s teenagers, imagine the effect it has had on the popular ones. Zvooq has quite a task ahead of it.  

Timothy Munro Roberts is the genius behind online music streaming hub Station Digital, a multitasking service that gives subscribers access to over 20 million songs from all kinds of musical genres. Keep posted on updates on music platforms by subscribing to this Facebook page.

Hard-to-find no more: The impressive song library of streaming apps

Some songs were so wonderfully played and written that fans and music connoisseurs wonder why they never charted.

Such was the point of this Huffington Post article, which listed down quite a handsome number of tunes that well captured the ‘80s, when glam rock was in and tons of hairspray fashioned thick piles of hair.

However, songs on the said list, such as David Bowie's tuneful and moody "Ashes to Ashes" and "Burning Up," a fiery, upbeat tune from a then up-and-coming Madonna, were pushed aside into oblivion by smash hits that ruled the radio and the Top 40 charts in the ‘80s.

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Other gems, like Queen's "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy" and Eric Clapton's "May You Never," were not big enough to make it to the iconic artists' compilation albums, leaving frustrated music lovers thinking of taking trips to specialty record bars or rare-item stores just to get a hold of these tunes, no matter how far and wide and tedious the search can get.

Music aficionados shouldn't fret, though. Digital copies of these songs exist somewhere along the infinite cloud. All it takes is hitting the search bar, or sifting through the sea of music streaming sites and online radio channels.

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With libraries averaging 25 million songs, listeners subscribed to music streaming services will definitely not end up empty-handed if it's rare musical gems that they are finding.

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For the discriminating, curious, and adventurous tastes, music from niche artists are just a few taps away, and so are relatively unknown tracks and covers by icons back when they were fledging artists. What was once close to being unimaginable has indeed arrived, and waiting to be explored.

Get both standards and rare finds only from premium music streaming sites like Timothy Roberts' StationDigital. Visit this website to know more about StationDigital.

"App" above the rest: Why the streaming service is the best option for listening

As the song goes, everyday we're shuffling.

In fact, people have long been enjoying the practice of admixing tunes and picking out the ones that please their tastes. Back in the 18th century, concert patrons in England were already treated to an assortment of musical compositions with varying intensity and rhythm. Over the years, the shuffle went from manual to digital, thanks to jukeboxes, radio jocks, the iPod, and most recently, the music streaming apps.

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Such services have become so phenomenal that half of the American population own at least one such shuffling app in their mobile devices. Such success can be attributed to the unique experience it offers.

Its major strength lies on the idea of the stream---that ceaseless flow of data that people can access thanks to the complex science of Big Data. On top of the almost endless catalog of songs (20 to 30 million based on available data), subscribers get well-curated recommendations based on their social media profiles, habits, and attitudes, making the listening experience far more personalized and more rewarding than any listening device ever produced.

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Another advantage is choice---an almost infinite wealth of it. Evan Eisenberg, in his 1987 book titled "The Recording Angel," describes how music, like any other commodity, is consumed in an age where cultural priorities and preferences are rapidly shifting from the communal to the individual. Self-expression is hinged on the freedom to choose from whatever brands (of music, in this regard) are available and to form a unique combination out of one's choices. Subscribing to a streaming service sustains the people's hunger for individuality: it's like going to a supermarket with tens of millions of songs to browse and listen to.

Thus, thanks to apps like Spotify, Pandora, and Station Digital, listeners can get to play, pause and skip songs without interference from disk jockeys and with minimal or no commercial interruption. And because sound quality is consistent regardless of weather and location, listeners never have to worry again about being interrupted by poor radio signal.

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Last but not least, streaming apps break geographical and cultural boundaries like no station or device ever did. They are available for smartphone and tablet users worldwide, while playlists carry an array of songs that cut across genres and boundaries. Thus, users of music streaming services from countries like India do not only get their fix of US Billboard-charting singles and local smash hits, they are also free to explore the best of music from foreign cultures for a more diverse bridging of worlds and tastes.

Aiming to give music lovers the best listening experience, Timothy Munro Roberts developed Station Digital to give unlimited access to the latest and greatest tracks. Visit this blog for more information on the music streaming industry.

Music apps revive the radio star: How apps make the idea of celestial jukebox happen

In the 1990s, it floated as a possible game-changing idea: At the time when record executives were fraught with fear that competition from television and other emerging mediums might hurt record sales and kill radio, which was the medium that used to drive the sales, the idea of a celestial jukebox was pitched.

 

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Stanford Professor Paul Goldstein coined the term to describe how technology would mean exciting times ahead for music: If video could really kill the radio star, then a new medium for playing songs would resurrect him. The celestial jukebox was envisioned to give listeners access to an almost limitless wealth of past and present songs that could be played right at their fingertips.

That dream is here now. In fact, it has been making baby steps since the early part of the 21st century. People saw the rise of portable devices and websites that allow for streaming and downloading music. What followed was the birth of tablets and smartphones marketed with the promise of better, faster interaction and connection with people. Record-fast Internet speeds and the development of mobile applications allow these gadgets to deliver such promise.

 

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A handful of these applications allow for playing music on demand. Downloadable for a small amount or even for free, in the case of some, these online, customizable stations allow listeners to play and pause their favorite songs and discover new ones. These apps also allow users to share their playlists with their friends, making listening to music a social activity like it used to be. Really, it's like a jukebox minus the nickel slot.

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It's no wonder about half of Americans are hooked into at least one of these music streaming apps on their mobile gadgets.

Headed by Timothy Munro Roberts, Station Digital allows music lovers access to their favorite songs, right at their fingertips. Visit this blog for more information.

Listen to Music = Make Money = Shop in a CloudWebStore

Seldom does the opportunity to make money listening to music arise, but most recently a new company is offering music lovers across the Internet the chance to do just that.  Station Digital is the newest and one of the most innovative ways for users to do little more than utilize the service and earn points to purchase the music they love, or buy other physical goods being offered through its CloudWebStore.  The formatting is fairly simple and yet the process is quite ingenious. 

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When a newly-converted user first signs up for the free service, they immediately earn 1000 points, or the equivalent to $1.00.  Every time they go onto the site and stream the musical selection of their choosing, points are earned.  By doing little more than listening to music and rating certain titles and artists, reward points are consistently accumulated to purchase physical or digital copies of music, movies, video games, posters and more.  For diehard music fan, this is truly a no-brainer.  

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Over the last decade online music streaming has seen a tremendous boost in user traffic.  People no longer have to settle for terrestrial AM/FM radio, and with the selection made available by services like Station Digital, it feels only natural for someone to go where they can delve deep into customizing playlists with info like mood, era, location, interest and themes.  All the while, music experts are continually monitoring user tastes and history to better recommend other kinds of bands and artists that may open them up to all new discoveries in different genres.  No longer are we subjected to Top 40 radio where predictability is a given.  Listeners have become empowered by online music streaming and are finally in control of what they hear and when they hear it. 

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To learn more about the CloudWebStore concept and how Station Digital is pioneering new ways of servicing customers and incentivizing them in the process, check out the company website for a more in-depth look at how entertainment is now even more rewarding.

Internet Radio and the New Station Digital

Internet radio has become a media force over the past decade and more providers are finding ways to entice users into steaming music. Standard models now include free services with the opportunity to upgrade to access better features, and many companies have seen success rise and bring more competition.

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The best internet radio sites provide stations that are grouped in similar ways to an actual radio; stations are themed to genre and common traits. The advantage to internet radio, however, is that sites can automatically create stations based on users' preferences. In addition, stations can be monitored by users to create a better musical profile and to ensure that the best music is played constantly. The majority of internet radio allow for the creation of custom stations based on artist similarities or song qualities that are mirrored in other tracks. 

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A new feature that has been debuted in Timothy Munro Roberts' Station Digital is the additional of a user rewards program for even the free users. The concept is simple: the more a user listens to tracks, the more rewards a user gets. Rewards can be applied in the site's online store for real merchandise, such as free downloads, physical products such as fan clothing, and more. The core service is similar to others in that users create, manage, and listen to stations and playlists at their leisure, but Timothy Munro Roberts and Station Digital still insist on keeping services free while providing real benefits to the customer. The site has amassed over 23 million songs very quickly, meaning that users have access to a huge library within moments of logging in.

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The trend of digital radio has attracted more companies over several years but the concepts have remained the same, but Station Digital has taken a new approach. For more information on Station Digital, visit the company's website and browse through what the service has to offer. 

The upside of premium: Going ad-free and more

What most people on the Internet take for granted is that running online services doesn’t come cheap. The hosting services have to be paid for in some way, and many online services and content are either offered free of charge or derive some form of income from a subscription to use their products and services.

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The former is usually more widely used by social networks, with the incoming network traffic and subsequent ad revenue being more than sufficient to keep things afloat, whereas the latter is usually the course taken by the extensions of real life businesses such as software developers.

 

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Others combine both business practices, offering their core services for free while giving a number of other benefits to premium subscribers. Due to the rising costs of bandwidth and the maintenance of websites, this system of offering more services to subscribers remains a good compromise. Many startup companies and other Web services go by this route as a business model, offering their basic functions free of charge for the casual user while enticing more engaged users, businesses and professionals in particular, with more features.

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For many businesses, this practice makes the best use of both worlds. Frequently, the most common benefit touted is the ability to surf without seeing intrusive advertisements, which is such an appealing offer in many circles that it has also been applied, to a limited degree, for not-for-profit setups like forums and Wikis, which reward donors with a certain period without advertising.  

Founded by technology executive Timothy Munro Roberts, the GoldenHeart Holdings company Station Digital offers both free and premium streaming services for music fans looking for new songs across multiple online radio stations. Visit this website for more information on the service.