Samsung’s Music Hub service to shut on July the 1st

Samsung is to shut down its own digital music service called Music Hub on the 1st of July. The news doesn’t come as a surprise given the company's new direction in the music space with Milk in the US and the Deezer partnership in Europe: Music Hub just didn’t manage to get the traction the company was hoping for.

Music Hub had started its life as an offspring of mSpot, a service that was purchased by Samsung in May of 2012. The service had changed focus a number of times but none of the iterations managed to capture the interest of consumers.

Samsung has now adopted a much more pragmatic approach to the digital music space, although there are some holes in its methodology.

In the US, Samsung has chosen to launch the internet radio service Milk, with a big fanfare at SXSW and a significant marketing spend to promote the service. Milk is essentially a re-purposed version of Slacker Radio so Samsung didn't have to spend an insane amount of resources starting from scrach or chasing licensing deals. This also means that Samsung is tied to Slacker’s licenses to provide the service and as the company has not expanded beyond the US yet Milk has no chance to expand internationally anytime soon.

It is probably for this reason that shortly after announcing Milk in March, Samsung also announced a partnership with Deezer in Europe which sees selected phones being sold pre-loaded with the Deezer app and including a six month free subscription to the premium version of the streaming service. Deezer has the biggest global footprint in terms of accessibility and should it prove to be a popular option the partnership is easily scaleable internationally.

Now, given that Slacker will have a hard time sorting its international licensing situation and Deezer hasn’t yet launched in the US, these two strategies appear to be on two parallel rail tracks which are never set to intersect, a baffling choice for a company that could leverage its global presence to provide a more cohesive experience. On top of that Samsung has recently stated that Milk users will soon start receiving ads and will have to upgrade to a premium tier costing $3.99 per month to get rid of them: only time will tell if users are prepared to start paying for a service that started as a branding exercise, but the chances of that happening are slim.

Samsung has also just announced the release of a range of wireless speaker that directly compete with sonos and allow for multi-room audio. The speakers include Bluetooth and NFC technology, and users will be able to control them via a dedicated app. The new focus of the company on wireless audio may be as good a reason as any to clear the air and finally put an end to the Music Hub experiment avoiding further confusion for consumers new to the Samsung ecosystem.


(Andrea Leonelli)