Yesterday I went to the press launch of Pure Digital’s latest offering: Flow Songs Beta.
Essentially, it allows listeners to a number of Pure’s internet radios (usually with FM and DAB built in), to identify and buy any track they hear played on their radios. The way it works is that when you’re listening to a track you’re interested in you press a button on the radio. At this point, the song is effectively “Shazamed” and the details of the track are presented to you along with the price. You can then complete your purchase and buy the song.
Once purchased, the song remains “in the cloud”, and you can stream it from Pure’s Lounge direct to your radio. You can also visit the Pure Lounge website and download the song you’ve bought in mp3 format, to place on whatever devices you like.
It seems to work pretty well – at least with Western tracks that are in Shazam’s database, and 7digital’s library (they’re effectively retailing the music for Pure). At the presentation we were told it opened up the music of 15,000 streaming radio stations, which I’m not certain will prove to be the case – there’s a lot of obscure music out there.
But it’s a neat workaround stations either providing inaccurate “now playing” information, or not putting out any information at all. It also lets you identify and buy music from FM, internet and DAB stations.
Pure is using the strapline “Hear it. Buy it. Love it” to describe this service. This may ring a few bells with anyone who remembers a GWR texting initiative that had the strapline “Hear it, buy it, burn it” and also allowed you to purchase music you heard on the radio. Then there was the technology from UBC called Cliq. The fact that these services no longer exist, does suggest that they weren’t glorious successes.
To be fair, that service only worked on certain stations, and was more complex. Using audio tagging via the services of Shazam is a clever workaround. But I’m not convinced that this is going to be quite the big thing that Pure thinks it’ll be.
For starters, it’s only in relatively expensive internet connected devices. And consumers have many different ways to buy music these days. Pure’s not really winning over many radio stations with this technology. Although a listener is able to easily buy a track they’ve heard on the radio, there’s nothing in it for the radio station. So I don’t think many stations will be promoting this service. On the other hand, if you visit a commercial station like Absolute Radio or Classic FM, that publishes its full tracklisting on its website, the station can earn money via affiliate links with whichever music site they’ve done deals with. Although broadcast rules from Ofcom can limit how these services can be promoted, there’s a belief that rules will soon be lifted to an extent allowing explicit calls to buy tracks via station websites.
But it’s a useful bit of technology, and time will tell how much it’s adopted by consumers.
One thing that came up, and I find really curious, is the legality of streaming tracks you’ve bought. Seemingly, even though I’ve purhcased a track, there may be issues about me streaming my tracks via devices like internet radios. There are plenty of applications that let you conncet to your music library remotely – streaming your home iTunes music at work for example. The suggestion is that this might not be legal! I’d like to learn more about this curio. I should add that Pure strenuously pointed out that they respect intellectual property, but this might be a PRS for Music/PPL issue. We’ll see.
These are my opinions and don’t necessarily reflect those of my employer. Mind you, I did attend the press event in working hours…
Updated to correct previous technologies.