Downloads Transferring to Streaming

Subscriptions: a recap, a forecast Miichaell Bhaskar Opiiniion - Diigiitall Wednesday, 17th June 2015

Michael Bhaskar asks whether, after all the talk about ebook subscription services, they may be on the point of working.

We've been here before - wondering if book subscriptions will be the new model to dominate (digital) bookselling. If one topic has been a conference essential, it's this one. Yet in the two or three years since talk started, there has been a curious inertia. VC dollars have piled in, the "panel index" has gone through the roof, but concrete change has been more limited. What's really going on? The proposition for subscriptions are as simple as they are seductive: someone will do for books what Spotify did to music and Netflix did to TV and film. Someone will come and create a new start-up that captures consumers' imaginations, locks in their wallets and rescues creative industries from the cul-de-sac of their own digital business model. The pllayers In publishing there are numerous ventures. Among the best established is Oyster, based in New York, with millions in VC money. But Oyster found signing large corporate partners difficult with a subscription model, and has rowed back to selling content individually. Scribd, a well-financed document-sharing service based in the financial bubble of the San Francisco tech scene, offers unlimited reading for $8.99 per month. Then last year came the biggie - Kindle Unlimited. But it's unclear what take-up is like. For £7.99 users have access to over 700,000 books; the question is, are those the books people want? No one is sure. European efforts are also in the mix. Madrid's 24Symbols is a veteran of the space and is starting to make inroads around the world. A recent star has been Denmark's Mofibo, huge in its home market and making advances in other European territories. Moscow's Bookmate is also creating new subscription audiences. It's worth comparing where we are in books with music. Spotify just completed a new funding round of $526m - based on an $8.5bn valuation. It has 84m users, about a quarter of them paying money. Those users can listen to a catalogue of 30m songs (20,000 new ones are added every day) and they have created 1.5bn playlists to help navigate this endless sea of sound. Spotify is now a business with serious scale that has uttertly transformed the business of music.

www.bookbrunch.co.uk Design by: BDS Digital © BookBrunch Ltd. This can be seen in the trend of listeners who used to buy downloads transferring to streaming. Earlier this year the Rubicon was crossed when revenues from the latter overtook the former. The downloaded MP3 - in some ways analogous to the ebook file - is on the way out. The wider ramifications are enormous. Apple, previously dominant in the space, isn't taking the challenge lying down. Investing some of its insane cash pile in music is a priority, and it is launching a streaming service, Apple Music, based on the Beats platform it bought for $3bn. Nor is this just a commercial and technology push - Apple is hiring DJs such as Ninch Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe to curate the service. Google isn't going to be left out either - it has augmented its own subscription and streaming service, Google Music, with the acquisition of song recommendation engine Songza. Moreover, all this activity is part of a huge ecosystem of streaming music. Vevo, Pandora and Rdio all have large audiences; Tidal, a new service created by artists including Jay Z and Madonna ,is getting huge press coverage; Soundcloud has continuing appeal. And books? Subscriptions have remade the music industry - so why not books? The key answer is the attitude of the majors. Stung by piracy, scared by the dominance of iTunes, the big record labels like Universal went into subscription streaming from the start. But in publishing, key players such as Penguin Random House and Hachette have not played ball. Without their must-have content, subscription services face an uphill battle. Another answer lies in the faulty comparison of music and books. We listen to music in a general way; each song takes only minutes of our time. The amount of music we can listen to in a given month and the number of books are very different. However, I think this shows a good route for books subscriptions: in niches. Academic publishing has been doing this for some time. Look at Bloomsbury's strategy of buying properties such as Berg Fashion Library, and building others in finance, law and archival work. This is basically a subscription model, but very targeted and in areas where the content is a must have. The same goes for journal publishing - the Nature Publishing Group has long been the powerhouse of Macmillan publishing. In trade publishing this could translate into specific subscriptions for writers, imprints and above all genres, where hand-picked selections are sent every month to readers of, say, science fiction. You might subscribe to a writer's choices for a year. Subscriptions go from being a straight volume proposition, which doesn't exactly translate from music to books, to something more focused. Another might be the services to which subscription sites are compared. Wattpad, in my view, is probably the best-placed new venture in all publishing. The number of monthly active users is off the charts. On Wattpad writers upload and comment on whatever they like - genre fan fiction predominates, often in short form, often reactive, often with marginalised content. But the analogy for Wattpad is not Netflix or Spotify. It's not subscriptions. It's YouTube. So perhaps that's where we should have been looking all along. Overall I am bullish that some form of subscription/streaming model will impact publishing. It is, for me, the natural way of consuming digital content of any kind. At some stage we'll be here again. Miichaell Bhaskar iis Co-founder and Publliishiing Diirector of Canello and author of The Content Machiine.. He

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