Digital music seller and white-label store 7digital is finding growth in its new dual strategy of offering mobile apps and preloading them on to mobile devices.
The company says it now has over a million active users on these devices, which now contribute a fifth of its music sales.
- The growth is partly the result of device makers like Samsung, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), Philips and Toshiba bundling 7digital-powered music stores with their new ranges of tablets and mobiles.
- But 7digital’s own-brand app has seen 500,000 Android installs and 600,000 BlackBerry installs.
This has been a replacement revenue stream for the loss of Spotify, which recently pulled in-house its music downloads after having previously powered them through 7digital.
iTunes Store is still far and away the most popular digital music retailer, and new unlimited-access services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Mog are also gaining traction.
But 7digital has been exploiting the gaps in between with a pseudo-cloud service and by trying to ride the mobile/tablet adoption curve. None of the new subscription services have yet had much success finding bundling partners, but 7digital has quietly been adopted by some of the biggest names that aren’t Apple.
This time last year, these devices made up only five percent of 7digital’s music sales. 7digital’s other asset is its API, which has allowed partners like Last.fm, Spotify and Songbird to offer their own music download purchases through 7digital.