Current And Future Use of Technology Essay

Spotify has provided a way for people to access and sh be medication with aids such as exchange of selections and take down unstable access. In the process of providing these services, the users data is acquired by center of initial registration and this helps categorize the mart. The main target for Spotify is not registration of premium accounts without adverts but the disembarrass use by the public where adverts can be played in between songs.thither be many b some others handled by Spotify in the clientele including competitor from existing online medicine selling companies standardized Sony and Apple, and challenges on fair artists royalties with restrictions by copyrights in some regions. The e argumentation system is well established for Spotify as the company deals with unison producing companies and companies who look for a way to give notice (of) brands. The helpmate to peer technology utilize and the feature of listing to medical specialty even when off line unneurotic with a simple user interface argon all technological advantages of Spotify that engender it popular in the market.The coming(prenominal) of Spotify is based on integration of the package into hand held processing devices like modern ph mavens, and having a effective relation with the inaugurations of music. E-Business background Spotifys task thought process was to create a medium by dint of which to provide advertisers with a way of reaching a traceable and response predictable market. By creating a digital library of a capacious-eyed descriptor of music and an interface through which listeners can register and listen to music free, Spotify was able do yet that. There are adverts pushed in between songs and last for between 15 and 30 seconds.The users that dont want to get interference from the audio adverts can pay a monthly fee to gag rule them. The portion of listeners who pay this fee is so small compared to the free users, who form the main mark et idea for Spotify. The company has arrangement with the worlds major(ip) labels to provide their music and in re turn over occupy an 18% stake in the company. The integration of the music producing companies, the listeners and the advertisers forms the e-business model for Spotify. There is competition from similar companies like Last.fm, Amazon (which sells music online), my space and facebook with the depend meet being Last. fm. Spotify and Last. fm have integrated their systems though and this form a way to create an entry hardship in an effort to protect extravagantly profit business and raise competition advantage for both companies to realize. Porters Five Forces model Spotifys business faces the five forces from threats of substitute, barriers to entry, supply government agency, buyers power and rivalry (Porter 1985). There are various ways that it has put up strategies to deal with this.First, there is the presence of substitute firms like Last. com Spotify has planne d to sing a deal in merged operations with the company in order to incr succour the business opportunities for both sides. It was proposed that the advertisers/brands could then be able to buy advertising services across the platforms of the two companies (McCormick 2009). According to the nature of the platform on which the adverts are run, Spotify has created a medium where the nitty-gritty is streamline with the music being listened to.Apart from the major rival with whom Spotify agrees to merge business with, the brands leave alone face a hard time looking for an alternative service of the kind. Thus the buyers power is low-pitched, considering that there are similarly many scattered brands to advertise through the electronic platform. Further more(prenominal), the platform provides a way of major record labels availing their music to the users, making real that brands can get the largest number of music fans at Spotify, which they cannot get from online music shops. On the suppliers power towards Spotifys business, there are many music producing labels that offer a variety of music.Also, the fact that the buyers of the service are somewhat weak, the suppliers are also put in the same line because advertisers has no much power over Spotify, they cannot demand of circumstantial record labels. Since the entry of Spotify into the e-business, the key issue is to keep the prices offered virtually low in order to provide a barrier of entry of new competition. One strategy apply by firms to this effect is merging their markets and operations so that they can enjoy economies of scale and protect the spunky profit market from other entrants while keeping the quality of services high.This was a case assertable from the Spotifys deal with Last. fm. There is rivalry in the industry of e-business and marketing through electronic means has been applied by many companies. The industry is disciplined though, from previous competition, the methods of enticing the music fans and through ease of use of platforms by the market forming population. The application streams music with no buffering times and provides a very wide variety of ready to listen categories of songs from major record labels.The fact that the market for Spotify seems to be exponentially maturement means that soon the buyers will be so many and so their power will go down, providing a business advantage for the company ( ). E-Marketing The internet is a unique marketing medium in that it provides a global market with instant response dynamism. The fact that when a product is advertised through the internet can reach millions of users within a short while is enough to make it a rich market. Spotify has its marketing strategy based on online access of adverts by the users in their endeavor to listen to music. Data and Market AnalysisThe strongest part of Spotify registration of users is that it takes the demographic data so that the company is in a position to provide marketin g strategies to advertisers based on age, location and music taste. The ability to poll and classify a market is important to advertisers, especially when it involves technical goods and services. Promotion and expeditious services The interpolation of the roving version of Spotify software has helped in a far reaching marketing strategy. The whole issue has been in news for sometime and major discussion blogs and websites like BBC NEWS, leading to less costly forward motion effect in Europe.The market in Spotify is really the online internet resource as well as the users PCs and portable mobile Activities Spotify engages in various activities that are geared towards having a wide base of users so that it can reach more people when targeting an audience for an advert. These activities include invite scheme, signalise a friend and viral advertising. The invite scheme is where the newly registered and the existing members are given an fortune to invite friends and family to exp erience Spotify while still promoting the premium membership.The tell a friend activity involves a Spotify inbuilt tool to spread word of mouth. This is a strategy to use the existing users to get the message to their friends using the already existing internet framework. The other one is viral advertising where the medium generally used is social meshinging frameworks like facebook. The most visited WebPages are targeted and a multimedia message displayed. Web-design Spotify has created a peer to peer application that streams music between the listeners computer, whether online or offline.Spotify has a service to which clients connect and have the confine of the cache summarized in an index finger which is then sent to Spotifys stream hub. The data in the index is usually used to alert other users of the additional peers they can connect to, to fetch streamed data for specific songs being played. This arrangement is enabled and tolerated by each upon start up. Each client list en to incoming connections from other Spotify clients like a server and connects to other users to exchange cached data. The users are actually not in apposition to configure the connections or alter the bandwidth of transmission of data.These settings are hard coded in the system. The design of the entire computer architecture may be complicated but the interface used by the listeners is so simple and effective. There are just few controls of play, rewind and forward. The Spotify application offers the following features to the users Catalogue Spotify offers users access to millions of music tracks including songs from major music labels. Some specific music from some artists may not be available due to boundary regulations in the copyright. Playlists it allows users to create collections of favorite music and lets them share them.The users can also edit the playlists with other users together through collaborating software. For this purpose, the playlists can be shared through a n email or instant messaging window. On accessing the link, the data gets downloaded into Spotify. Integration with Last. fm the specific feature from last. fm is the ability to collect the users preference in music and store it into Last. fms database. This has been integrated into Spotify without requiring external plug-ins (Spotify Archives 2010). Radio feature this creates ergodic playlists of songs related to the music of the currently selected artist.Spotify has a simple to use interface that allows the user to search for music by artist, album or title. It displays the user chosen playlist and some advert image, which on clicking, one can explore the promotion (Spotify Forums 2010). Business-to-Business (B2B) Spotify has introduced the music service to the listeners and charge a certain rate for ad free music. However, it does not rely on this for its source of revenue. It largely relies on the free service where the listeners will have to bear with the adverts. At this poin t, it does business with other firms that want to advertise their brands to the listeners.The main target for business is therefore dealing with other companies that want to reach the audience. On the same platform, there is collaboration with major record labels where they claim a certain percentage stake in the company and in turn provide their music libraries to Spotify (Nylander 2009). Spotify focussinges on doing business with other businesses in its plans. It has tailored it product for mobile phones and approached the mobile phone making companies like apple in an effort to do business with them (Emerald). This is a direct challenge to Apples iTunes though and touches on the competition end.Mobile Commerce Spotify has produced a mobile version of the application that can allow users with premium accounts to access and listen to music wherever they go. It also allows the users to download a certain number of songs on to the phone for listening while out of network range. Mobi le business seems to be the future of IT marketing, especially with the progress and expectations of pervasive mobile programming. By considering the mobile version of the application to target the users on the move and virtually at all instances of life, Spotify has provided a wider more reaching market for its business.Given that all the mobile users will have to be premium users, the focus of mobile versions will be to create a customer base where the services will be like a contract between Spotify and the user (Ionescu 2009). This eliminates the advertisers from the picture and allows Spotify to compete with earlier established businesses on the same line like Apple, while still spreading the risk. Instead of relying on the advertising source alone, the company can at a time create a one to one relation with the music fans through their premium accounts. ConclusionsIt is a good business plan for Spotify to create such a huge market base by having so many users registered, both free and premium categories. The plan of pushing adverts into streamed music provides an excellent way of gaining the revenue from brands. On the mobile world, it provides a good way of reaching a wider market and a premium account for the mobile is a plus on the revenue. This was a heady decision considering the processing power of phones cannot be compared to that of PCs. The strategy of extending into the mobile world was a good way of preparing for the future of IT with the trends in pervasive mobile programming.Mobile marketing will form an even wider market considering the more frequent use and an extension of the PC use after work hours. Recommendations The competition in the market is high and Spotify will have to deal with some issues, especially with the application interface and specifically the technology on the size of bandwidth among other resource utilized on users machines. Criticism is usually on the fact that the interface does not give a user the access to contr ol the derive of resources like bandwidth that Spotify uses against other systems on the same machine.The issue of coming up with a way of establishing the mixed bag of music sources with their effect on the market using the users data to determine the ratings would be an important amour to indulge in, in order to establishing a fair royalties to the artists in order to keep everyone happy and the future of Spotify bright (BBC News 2010). More concentration on helping the production teams with useful demographic and ratings breeding will give the company a strong relationship with the source of music, the medium they use to make money. ReferencesBBC News, (2010) Spotify boss Daniel Ek sets out future plans, Online, Available http//news. bbc. co. uk/2/hi/8478599. stm Porter M. (1998) Competitive strategy techniques for analyzing industries and competitors, Free Press, ISBN 0684005778, 9780684005775. McCormick, A. (2009) Spotify and Last. fm moot partnership, Britannica article Re volution (14605953) Online, Available http//www. britannica. com/bps/additionalcontent/18/38216709/Spotify-and-Lastfm-moot-partnership Ionescu D. , Nov 23, 2009, Spotify Lands App for Symbian Phones, like a shotPCworld, Online, Available http//www.pcworld. com/article/182833/spotify_lands_app_for_symbian_phones. html Robert Andrews, 2009, Apple Approves Spotifys iPhone App, web article on Paid suffice UK, Online, Available http//paidcontent. co. uk/article/419-spotify-says-apple-still-testing-iphone-app-spotify-vanishes-from-app-s/ Emerald, Current CITE-ings from the popular and trade computing press, Library Hi Tech News, mountain 26, Issue 9, Online, Available http//www. emeraldinsight. com. ezproxy. cqu. edu. au/Insight/ViewContentServlet? contentType=NonArticle&Filename= print/NonArticle/Articles/23926iae.001. html Spotify Archives (2010) Spotify for iPhone v0. 4 now available, Online, Available http//www. spotify. com/int/blog/archives/2010/03/31/iphone-v4/ Johan Nylander, R ecord labels part owner of Spotify, from The Swedish Wire, Published Friday, 07 August 2009, Online, Available http//www. swedishwire. com/business/680-record-labels-part-owner-of-spotify Spotify Forums, What is Spotify? Why choose Spotify? How much advertising? Online, Available http//www. spotify-forum. com/what_is_spotify. php