There’s still life in the old dog yet. Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) biz dev guys have been busy bees – both Bebo and UK commercial radio leader GCap have decided to add links on their sites that point users to songs available from the iTunes Store.
Bebo is adding the integration to the profiles of all musicians on its Irish site, which has around a million users, although the artists will of course need an existing presence on iTunes. From the release: “(The companies) will continue to work together on multiple levels to create similar innovative marketing platforms … and turn popularity within a social network into direct revenues.”
For all the high-falluting hype in this NMA story of “blurring the barriers between radios and MP3 players” and “developing innovative experiences and simplifying the user’s journey between new music discovery and purchasing”, GCap, too, is basically adding iTunes links to the basic web player used by the likes of Capitol and Xfm, so that the track currently on-air can be bought straight from the PC.
The serendipity of instantly purchasing a track being played on radio is a holy grail for a music industry still not offsetting physical sales decline with digital growth and for a radio industry that has watched its revenue from on-air ad sales dip before a slight recovery late this year. An alternative to GCap’s proposal is Cliq, the just-launched mobile/radio/PC service from UBC that lets listeners choose tracks to buy either from a DAB radio or a Java mobile phone client – tracks can be downloaded either to a computer or a phone. Cliq is currently used by GMG, Global Radio, Chrysalis and Emap (LSE: EMA) stations.
Update: GCap London boss Fru Hazlitt will this afternoon be named group CEO, replacing long-time chief exec Ralph Bernard.
(Photo: Kaysha, some rights reserved)