There has been a tremendous amount of press recently surrounding Spotify’s much anticipated launch in the United States. Of course, Spotify’s U.S. launch has been a long time in the making. While Spotify was founded in 2008, until recently it services were only available in Europe.
I first learned of Spotify (www.spotify.com) just about two years ago when I read a July 25, 2009 article in The New York Times by Brad Stone entitled “The Music Streams That Soothe an Industry.” At the time, my co-founder Mike Bielenberg and I were deep into the planning phase about the business model for this site, MusicRevolution.com, an online marketplace for royalty-free production music. At that point, the production music business had largely been conducted offline. But we had strong beliefs that the production music business, which has lagged behind consumer music and other types of content, would continue to migrate to the Internet. Our original plan was focused on taking the same types of production music products that were traditionally sold offline, and selling them online instead. Our plan was create an innovative online platform to enable music buyers to find and license the best stock music using easy and affordable royalty-free license terms. And our plan as a production music marketplace was based on creating an online platform and community to provide professional and aspiring musicians the opportunity to license their music and collaborate with each other. Following the trends that were occurring with consumer, or popular, music, it was clear to us that production music would make the same move to the web.
After I read the article mentioned above, a light bulb went off that there was yet another opportunity to monetize production music online. I read that Spotify’s model was based on consumers streaming music rather than downloading individual tracks like on Apple’s iTunes. When I read this about Spotify I thought why couldn’t we do the same thing with production music. So in addition to enabling buyers to download production music tracks for commercial use, we conceived the MusicRevolution Internet Music Stream http://www.musicrevolution.com/music_streams for background music while Spotify streams music to consumers for individual listening, MusicRevolution.com’s Internet Music Stream provides an affordable, royalty-free alternative for background music for a range of commercial applications, including retail, restaurant, fitness club, business and website background music. With our launch in April 2010, we believe that MusicRevolution.com was the first to stream production music using the Internet for commercial use as background music. For now, we believe that the future for commercial background music is streaming over the Internet, rather than delivery by satellite and other proprietary systems. Who knows what the next evolution will be?
With all the press about Spotify’s U.S. launch, it’s ironic that there was an article on July 15, 2011 in Silicon Republic entitled “Music Revolution for America – Spotify to go live in US today”. We agree that a revolution is occurring and will continue to occur with all digital content, including consumer and commercial music. That’s why we acquired the domain name www.musicrevolution.com back in June 2009. We thought the name pretty much summed what had started and will continue to happen with music.
I want to say thanks to Spotify for giving us the idea for MusicRevolution.com’s Internet Music Stream for background music. We wish Spotify good luck with its U.S. launch.
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Chris Cardell is the co-founder of MusicRevolution.com http://www.musicrevolution.com, a production music marketplace where media producers, video producers, filmmakers, game developers, businesses and other music buyers can license high-quality, affordable royalty-free music from a online community of musicians. Cardell has been involved with digital content and E-Commerce since the mid-1990’s.
