CÜR Music debuts in the US, but do we need another music streaming service?
CÜR Music grabbed a few headlines last week on music industry sites for reaching an agreement with the three majors Sony, UMG and Warner, and launching a new streaming music service in the US.
The service aims to be a social app as well as a music app, and blends the functionality of Pandora with that of Spotify, offering different membership tiers starting at $1.99 per month. The home page of the service states it is “A mix of internet radio, expertly curated stations, and your own playlists all-in-one.”
The service has “launched” but is not yet available to the wider public, potential users are invited to sign up with the email address to be notified of wider availability.
Just like Spotify, CÜR Music had to part with a hefty percentage of its equity in order to reach its deals with the majors.
The question mark is whether there is a need for more music streaming services, especially in the US where internet radio providers like Pandora and iHeartRadio create an even more diverse spectrum of services.
The answer is not an easy one, and a key issue here is that there is currently a wide price gap between internet radio services (which rely primarily on advertising, see Pandora) and on-demand music streaming.
CÜR Music attempts to bridge this gap by providing a service that enables some on-demand choices (eight songs per day, that can be swapped, as reported by Music Ally) with internet radio functionality. So, in that respect, there may be a market for the service.
With the price of the streaming experience $1.99 and the option to bring it offline for $4.99, CÜR Music is perhaps a bigger competitor to Pandora than to Spotify. However, unlike Pandora, the service does not appear to be relying on compulsory licensing, but on direct deals with labels.
The key issue that has been observed with lower-priced services (including those that haven't worked, such as Bloom.fm in the UK), is the sheer volume of subscribers they require in order to generate substantial revenues. Pandora has a $4.99 subscription plan, but the vast majority of its revenues are generated via advertising to its non-paying user base, its situation being diametrically opposite to that of Spotify, where the majority of revenues are generated by paying subscribers. Can CÜR find the magic middle ground and conquer users willing to pay something but who find $9.99 per month too steep?
The company is still in its embryonic phase, having only a few hundred followers on Twitter and - probably due to the fact that it hasn’t launched widely yet - it has not received “mainstream” press coverage as of yet.
It will be interesting to see how CÜR plans to bring its service to the masses and cut through the noise generated by the already deafening number of services available on the US market today.
(Andrea Leonelli)