Spotify Premium: Needs “more features and functionality”

Let’s be honest, the Premium subscription – currently £9,99 a month – isn’t a great deal. The odd exclusive album and an ad-free service just doesn’t represent value for money.

Luckily, the Spotify team are under no illusions. New Media Age reports some of the ideas they’ve been drumming up to bring in the punters:

“The idea is to have a service with more features and functionality that will draw people in,” he said.

Brown, formerly international MD of Pandora, said a rich collection of premium services was set to be ramped up over the next few months, backed by marketing efforts.

“The way I see it happening for us is to create value by being a hub that has great channels, great things to do and a great music listening experience across lots of different platforms,” he said.

T3 magazine has a few more direct ideas, including making the mobile app a paid-for feature:

One such feature has already been showcased, Spotify on mobile phones. But that’s just one piece in the jigsaw, with Spotify also looking at living-room access, higher quality streams, bundled downloads, recommendations, ticketing and social features. If all those new features come in for the same £9.99 price, the new service will have ‘winner’ stamped all over it.

We agree.

Why all this talk of the pay model all of a sudden? A deal struck by Virgin Media with Universal allowing Virgin customers unlimited downloads of Universal tracks has blown the streaming music market wide open. The Virgin deal is all well and good, but Napster’s VP of sales and marketing for Europe, Thorsten Schliesche, sees a major flaw:

“The worst case is if Sky and Virgin only launch with Universal Music so the first experience for the customer is that not all content is available,” he said, adding there was a danger of ISPs feeling pressured to launch music services by the Government as it tackles piracy.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the mobile app (yet to be released) in action: