World Telemedia Day 2: Andrew Fisher, Shazam

They do

1. Content sourcing

Customers often tag music which is only just out - so they have to work v quickly to acquire content in local territories before it goes mainstream. Shazam get this from all sorts: labels, ringtone providers, others (e.g. MTV). This is really difficult.

2. Distribution/promotion

They've changed how they do this; historically one key partner in each territory, with multiple partners in larger territories. Direct sales to third parties or direct-to-consumer.

They prefer working with smaller organisations, monitor performance etc. Once they have a presence they get credibility. Direct sales make sense once you're familiar with a territory

3. Supporting multiple devices
4. Business Models

Subscription models; challenge is finding right price point
They're looking at free-to-consumer in Japan.
Would advise against spending weeks doing spreadsheets and debating. Test, evaluate, and repeat.

5. Legal frameworks

There are lots of legislative issues. They wanted to tie in dual downloads to their services but it requires relevant licenses, which the guys they were talking to didn't have. This tripped Shazam up during their planning - they did diligence on who had the capabilities, but not who had the licenses.

Jamsters subscription service in North America resulted in a big lawsuit.

Deploying IP in China has required a lot of care and a different approach.

He would advise understanding local legislation themselves, and building in flexibility; when you go global things change a lot.

Question: What information do you have on consumer interest? How many tags of a song result in a download.
Answer: Shazam have 4m customers, 2m calls/month (ramping up 100% over last 3-6 months). This is a small adoption rate considering the 500m handsets which have access to the service today. They need to drive behaviour change in consumers which takes time. They see Shazam as a mundane transaction-enabling technology; a convenient way to buy music products. Over the summer they had a 40% conversion rate to track downloads, which is more than they see with ringtone sales.

They're now doing a Java application rather than IVR - which is apparently quicker and easier.

Very poorly attended talk, this. Maybe everyone is nursing a sore head after last night but there are only about 20 folks here.

Mobile phones as devices for consuming music

Neil Marshall, Sales Director DX3

The over-the-air experience is stopping the spread of mobiles as a channel for downloading music.

DX3 do full-track downloads for folks like Woolworths.

35% of people asked say they want a mobile phone to play, store and retrieve music (tho asking people want they want when it comes to these new services may not be the best way of finding out)

Jeremy Copp, Chief Sales Officer Beatnik

Beatnik provide audio software for handsets. So what does software like this enable, beyond full track downloads?

Mobile music is following the PC/Internet model: mobile music is synonymous with music downloads. What about other services, considering the capabilities and context of use which are different for mobile?

Mobiles are inherently audio devices; personalised to a great degree; connected constantly; and communication about music is a social norm (is it? always? sounds wishy washy to me).

Ringtone market is a great indicator of the potential of audio services - is it? It's well understood, available to all.

There's apparently an inverse relationship between spend on handset and spend on ringtones - folks with cheaper phones buy more.

We need over the air downloads to reach the mass market - can't assume the PC and fixed internet is available to all. +1

User experience must be good: must be simple to find, preview and purchase content. They shouldn't require any technical knowledge of phone type, formats, etc.

Common audio formats are good (slight yawn)

Now he's talking about Mobile XMF, which I presume is a new format that Beatnik are pushing. Doesn't seem to be an open specification - looks like I have to pay for it.

Audio advertising - apparently this is good because customers are used to it from commercial radio.

The top ten phones in America: "Online retailer Wirefly released the top ten handsets (according to its sales) for last month. Seven of the ten have cameras and eight of the ten are Motorola handsets."

The games industry heads for Hollywood: "In some cases costs could even rise as high as $20m (£11.5m), it warned.

High costs coupled with the risk of games flopping mean developers are likely to focus on fewer and higher quality titles in future."

Yay. Bumped into Nick already.

Walked in on Conference Room 1 at the end of what I think were the keynotes...

Panelist talking about user-rated content. "Like all good ideas it reminds me of something I saw 15 years ago".

Guy from NZ: Revenue share is a distraction. Down under there's been a recognition of associated value - customer acquisition and retention etc. So content providers were moving away from revenue share to consultancy fees. Vodafone NZ slashed revenue shares.