Although Amazon’s ‘Prime Live Events’ have been critiqued for being an ‘iTunes Festival for old people’, the small-scale gigs by these heritage acts actually represents some clever strategy on the part of Amazon, as it looks to mix of the live/streaming game in a crowded industry.
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Guest post by Mark Mulligan of Music Industry Blog
Amazon has announced ‘Amazon Prime Live Events’, a series of smaller capacity gigs by largely heritage acts made available exclusively to Amazon Prime members in the UK. The first wave of artists include Blondie, Alison Moyet and Texas. Putting aside for a moment the obvious ‘it’s iTunes Festival for old people’ jibe, there is some sound strategic thinking underpinning the initiative.
The overlap between streaming and live has long been clear to streaming services (45% of live music fans are also streaming music users – check out MIDiA’s latest live entertainment report for more). It also presents a great opportunity to transform loss-leading streaming business into profit generators by monetizing the high value fans through ticket sales. However, no one has yet managed to realize the logical opportunity. Pandora’s full stack play with TicketFly, and Access Industry’s Deezer / Songkick play both represent potential at this stage, while other streaming services have made interesting announcements that soon disappeared from view.
Amazon might just be the one to make it work. It has quietly been building up its ticketing business for some time and because it sits on the same user dataset (and billing relationships) as Prime and Amazon’s 2 music services, it has an unrivalled ability to target and monetize.
Amazon Prime Live Events’ line up might not exactly be the cutting edge of edgy, exciting new music (Katie Melua rounds off the line up) but that is sort of the point. Amazon’s streaming music strategy is so interesting because it isn’t playing by the same rules as everyone else. Amazon is not competing for the same small group of 20/30 something music aficionados that the other streaming services are tearing chunks out of each other over. Instead it has its sights set on older, more mainstream music fans for whom the smartphone-centric music service offering has limited appeal.
This line up of gigs isn’t the end game, but instead the first step of what will likely be an increasingly joined up music strategy across Amazon’s various assets. The fact that 28% of UK live music fans are also Amazon Prime subscribers hints at where Amazon can go with this (overall UK Amazon Prime penetration is 19%). The fact that the gigs will be made available on Amazon Prime Video internationally further points to Amazon’s ability to join the dots across its increasingly diverse assets.
Throughout the first half of the 2010s Amazon was very much in the shadows of Apple and Google in terms of content strategy. Now not only is it giving them a run for the money in that arena, it is also making them pay close attention in terms of hardware and the home. What makes Amazon potentially the most interesting of the GAAF (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) is the way in which it combines customer data, billing relationships, content and services, infrastructure and consumer hardware. The 2000s was Apple’s decade. The 2010s are shaping up to be Amazon’s.