Spotify – Speaker’s corner pt. II.

Reply to this post

Spotify auto speaker is another wake up call.

• Spotify releasing a music player for the vehicle is an attempt to push back against Apple Music in USA and should be of concern to both the vehicle OEMs and the radio broadcasters.
• It looks like the hardware that Spotify will release on April 24^th will be a music player designed to be used in the vehicle.
• Publicity material discovered by some subscribers describes a circular device that sits on the dashboard that is controlled by voice and has its own 4G connection.
• Presumably, it has a rechargeable battery and connects to the vehicle via the Bluetooth audio profile.
• A few things leap immediately to mind:
  • First, USA only: I suspect that this will be a USA only product as Americans spend more time in their cars than anyone else and 66% of that time is still spent listening to broadcast radio through the analogue tuner.
  • Second, experimentation: It looks like Spotify has taken a leaf out of Amazon’s book and is tinkering to see what it can do in hardware.
  • Hardware, is a huge advantage that Apple Music has over Spotify as the Apple Music app is installed on over 1bn devices worldwide and set by default.
  • This makes it a much easier service to choose and to pay for giving Apple a substantial advantage on iOS.
  • USA is also the market where Apple has the highest share and so launching a hardware product into this market to make the user experience easier may make some sense.
  • Third, radio: Americans spend 101 minutes per day sitting in their cars and of that 101 minutes, they spend 66% of it listening to broadcast radio.
  • A big reason for this is that the radio is always there and all one has to do is turn it on.
  • Localised news, events and traffic is also a factor, but I suspect that ease of use is the main reason why radio listening is still very strong in USA.
  • Hence, a device that makes streaming easier to use in the vehicle is clearly a threat as it could cause the decline of radio listening to accelerate from its current snail’s pace.
  • Fourth, OTT. This is yet another over-the-top digital device that is fitted into a vehicle after its sale and is completely independent of the vehicle OEMs.
  • There are already a series of other sensors that can be retro-fitted to the vehicle by the driver that bypass the vehicle’s sensors and data network completely.
  • This is an indictment of how bad the user experience for anything digital remains in the vehicle and should serve as yet another wake up call to the vehicle OEMs.
  • Almost all OEM digital user experiences are poor and score extremely badly against RFM’s 8 Laws of Robotics for Digital Life services.
  • Hence, I think that unless they up their game in terms of the user experience, they are at great risk of losing it all.
• I very much doubt that Spotify will have much success with hardware, but the fact that a major company thinks that there is space in the market for a product such as this should send shivers down the spines of the incumbents.
• I continue to be pretty pessimistic on the trajectory for the OEMs when it comes to making the most from digital services and data as it is the smaller nimbler companies where the innovation is really to be found.