“What has made radio engaging is that personality it’s not just about doing a wonderful job of sequencing tracks on terrestrial radio. “Ultimately, we believe that one of the winning propositions is going to be more about offering a full-fledged audio experience that is personalised – versus one that is only focused on music,” he said. Orrell-Jones did talk about the growing importance of personalisation in the streaming market. (The service had 35 million registered users in May 2013, when it was estimated to have between 500,000 and one million subscribers.) “We are reticent to do that as those numbers end up being a distraction from where we see the opportunity ultimately.” Orrell-Jones declined to share details on Slacker Radio’s user numbers. Slacker Radio is currently only available in the US and Canada, with a catalogue of around 13m tracks – less than larger on-demand rivals, because it has focused on North American catalogue. But over the coming years there will be more granularity in pricing that is a little more focused on attracting the broader market of people. In order to launch a service, you have to go and get licences from a number of different players. “It’s an imperfect analogy, but if you look at what’s happened in the gaming space – where there was more freedom for innovation around pricing – there was an awful lot of interesting experimentation around free-to-play models.” “I came from a company where we had developed an interesting business across a wider range of subscription services – and that included music and audio products and gaming and all the way up to running a Disney-branded mobile phone service for Japan,” he said. With a pre-Slacker CV that includes stints as an executive at Disney Interactive Media Group and Nintendo, Orrell-Jones thinks that there are plenty of lessons from outside music that our industry can apply to the growth of subscription streaming. It has a free, ad-supported tier, a $3.99 tier with more features and personalisation, and a full on-demand tier for $9.99 a month. Slacker Radio, like Pandora, has been exploring multiple tiers of service. But it is really going to come down to product innovation and what is presented to people.” A lot of people will still open up their wallets for $9.99. “There’s a lot of room for growth in the subscription space overall and there’s lot of room for growth at $9.99 tier,” he said. He sees plenty of expansion potential for the subscriptions sector, for example, including the much-discussed $9.99-a-month price point. Orrell-Jones was not negative about every aspect of the streaming market, however. “I scratch my head at the sheer weight of the organisations they have.” “The question is this: how do those guys move towards profitability when they are carrying the sizeable organisation that they have?” he said. ![]() Orrell-Jones pinpointed the rapid growth of these companies’ headcounts as an important element in their risk levels. “And if Spotify really does want to go that way at some point, they are going to have to sell a story that the investors can get behind.” “Those companies are going to have to find a way at some point to pivot towards a business model that makes sense – because it’s just not sustainable as a public company to continue to lose money the way Pandora is,” he said. Orrell-Jones suggested that larger pureplay rivals, whose main competition are Amazon, Google and Apple (companies “who look at the space very differently and that clearly makes it a challenge”) face a battle for survival. “We are comfortable with the idea of being at a smaller scale,” he said. In an interview with Music Ally, Orrell-Jones said that Slacker Radio’s status as a niche player is working in the company’s favour much more than gambling everything on hitting mass adoption would. ![]() ![]() US internet-radio service Slacker Radio says it is on the verge of turning a protfit, with CEO Duncan Orrell-Jones criticising the ‘unsustainable’ business models of Pandora and Spotify. ![]() Tags: Pandora Radio Slacker Radio Spotify US
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