Flow Songs, the new service that lets you download songs direct from your radio, will be launching on Monday. It’s a service which brings together radio broadcast and digital music sales, in theory into a neat, functional service. We took a closer look, and weighed up some of the major pros and cons of Flow Songs, to ask you whether you’d use it…
The first important thing to note is that Pure is not looking to compete with iTunes et al with Flow Songs. Pete Downton, Director of Connected Services, stressed that this was very much the beginning of the project for Pure, and not the end, and said: “We’re not setting out to create a global service to dominate the market.” For the moment, the service works only through Pure’s internet connected radios, which is a five strong range. We asked Pete if this was going to change in the future: “We can and want to extend it, but we want to do that at a pace that the industry can keep up with.”
But what are the pros and cons? We’ve weighed them up, before Flow Songs launches on Monday, to give you the lowdown.
Pro: It’s easy to make a purchase through Flow Songs Really easy. It’s just a couple of clicks on your radio interface to identify and buy a song. The only fiddly bit (depending on the radio you’re using) might be entering your account password to authorise the sale. Its one click to identify, one click to buy, and another to either stream it right there and then, or flick back to the station you were using.
Pro: 7Digital Flow Songs is powered by 7Digital, which puts it in good stead. 7Digital generally has high quality tracks. It ingests content at a ridiculous rate too, and rakes over existing content to grab better versions as and when they become available. 7Digital has a good reach, and gets quite far into the outer circles of obscure or unknown music, meaning that in theory, the gaps between radio play and availability are at a minimum.
Con: The fee It’s a small con really, but after the 90 day free trial of Flow Songs, you’ll be asked to pay £2.99 for the annual service, which gives you unlimited allowance with the service. On top of this you still pay for individual tracks, priced up at whatever 7Digital charges. While £3 is a drop in the ocean for a service you might use a lot, what powers the service is Shazam, which is free. And while it’s expected that Pure need to take a cut at some point down the line to monetise the service, and might cause some people to turn their nose up.
Con: You need a Pure internet radio Pure has five internet connected radios, which start at an RRP of £100. You have to have this hardware to run the service, which is going to be one of the major stumbling blocks for Flow Songs. Pete Downton reckoned that there were 50,000-100,000 devices already in the marketplace, which is a small proportion, but like he said, this is about creating a service which can be built upon and expanded. There’s no intention to take on the might of Apple, Pure are using their niche and expertise, to merge radio with digital music sales.
What do you think? Will you use the service or not? Why? Click and tell…
I think that annual fee is a huge mistake. Shazam gets a slice of the purchase price for referring you back to 7Digital anyway.
Adding a fee on top of that is cheeky, and a bit greedy especially when Shazam is free on phones. It'd actually be cheaper for me to hold my phone up to the radio and hit the Shazam app… oh, and I could use it on any radio then too. Doh.
Flow Songs, the new service that lets you download songs direct from your radio, will be launching on Monday. It’s a service which brings together radio broadcast and digital music sales, in theory into a neat, functional service. We took a closer look, and weighed up some of the major pros and cons of Flow Songs, to ask you whether you’d use it…
