This is getting interesting – what with Virgin Media about to launch a music service in the UK, Nokia building up a head of steam on their Comes With Music strategy and We7 and Spotify gaining traction. It adds weight to my earlier ramblings about digital entertainment content being available everywhere on every device at any time turning the music/video into a commodity. The services that will win, therefore, will not be the ones that just offer access to millions of tracks (they’ll all do that) – it’ll be the ones that can integrate easily on all of our devices (computer, phone, TV, home stereo) and that can make sense of our tastes and moods to offer us the right music at the right time.

The thing that struck me most was the success of entertainment-based services (Spotify, Songkick, Songcloud are just three examples) and specifically the adulation that Spotify received. They were the clear winners on the night. I love seeing European companies getting traction and being rewarded for their success, however, I am a little perplexed that a service like Spotify, which is ultimately just another way of streaming content, had so much success. There is a real question mark over the long term viability of any content delivery service that doesn’t own its content – no matter how brilliantly intuitive or designed it is (and Spotify is both!).

My belief is the future will see us all have access to any music and video, any where and at any time. And the beauty (for consumers) and problem (for content services) with this is that if we can easily access all music on Spotify and We7 and Last.fm and any other newcomer in this space, what stops me from jumping from one to the other depending on what’s cheapest or coolest or best integrated? It’s not like you loose all of your music if you move to the next coolest music or video service, so what is it that keeps me there?

Last.fm developed a music social network, We7 have been attracting users by hosting exclusive content for a limited period and Spotify have focused on the simplicity of their UI and quality of the files. But is this enough to keep the technophile music fans from jumping ship next time another service launches?

Glatonbury mud festival

Glastonbury was four times bigger in 2009 than in 2008… well, in digital terms, anyway.

The BBC festival website managed a record of 7.2 million video streams and the red button coverage on digital TV attracted over 6.1 million viewers over the weekend. Lady Gaga was by far the biggest act online – attracting 1.3 million streams compared to last year’s top act Jay Z who attracted just 119,000 streams…

So, why the increased interest compared to 2008? It’s not like there are 4x more people online, surely? It could be because they had three webcams placed around the site giving visitors a chance to watch from different angles. Even though that was cool, I think that the increase has more to do with the fact that the iPlayer has become even more prevalent in our everyday lives over the last 12 months.

I am chuffed to bits to see two European-based music businesses growing so rapidly. These guys have clearly demonstrated that there is a demand for free (and legal) music which is effortlessly available on the web/desktop. This demand will ultimately lead to us having access to all entertainment content at any time on any device. There are still many distribution, rights and business model issues that need to be sorted before this happens, but it will happen.

So, once digital distribution has been sorted, the businesses that will thrive will be those who have also sussed out digital demand. In a world where everything is available to everybody at any time and on any device, demand is no longer based on what is available, but on what content is most relevant to us at that specific time. We will need smart filters that serve up relevant content to us based on location, time, entourage, past activity, tastes and mood.

That is why I am so excited about the work that my team is doing at The Filter. For the last 5 years we have been developing recommendation and relevance technologies for all types of digital content that use multiple inputs (consumption data, meta data, location, time zone, social data, etc…) to build models that enable us to work out the probability of what content goes with what situation – by using behaviour and mashing it up with meta data to provide a user with the most relevant content possible for them.

I am very proud that we have proven beyond any doubt that providing users with relevant choices of content leads to an increase in consumption per visit AND an increase in the number of visits because the user finds more content that they like at each visit. Over the last 12 months partners that use The Filter on their sites have seen uplifts in consumption of 15-20% based on increases in streams per visit and visits per week. And for us, it is just the start. As we get access to more data (using location on mobiles) and fine tune our engines, technologies like this will provide better content choices to individuals leading to more consumption.

Listening to online radio

My understanding is that the level of royalties finally agreed is still higher than traditional radio, however, they will enable companies like Pandora to exist. They have said that they will have to start charging $0.99 for users who listen to more than 40 hours per month – a small price to pay for one of the best online radio services available.

This news has come off the back of changes in the PRS rates for interactive radio in the UK. So, big question is will we see Pandora back in the UK market any time soon? The gap that Pandora left here was significant – just look at the traction that We7 and Spotify have had in the UK in the last 12 months.

I know that this is not the first event that has unfolded before our computer and mobile screens – but I cannot think of any other event dominating the news feeds, Twitter AND also triggering unprecedented digital revenues (see MJ’s near total domination of the iTunes charts across the world, as well as the matter of the 2.6 million downloads of his music in just one week).

And it doesn’t stop there; Mashable reported yesterday that Jacko’s fan page on Facebook went from 80,000 fans (before his death) to 6.7 million… eclipsing even previous ‘king of Facebook’ Barack Obama, and there was the online lottery to ‘win’ tickets to today’s memorial service.

This surge of Michael Jackson fever will undoubtedly slow down in the next few days, but I do think that we have witnessed a digital phenomenon like we have never seen before… and may never see again?

And one more thing – this moon walk video was viewed 14.5m times in the last few weeks on YouTube. Wow!