Omnifone reveals 300% subscriber growth year-over-year
- B2B cloud music provider Omnifone revealed some user figures for the period between January 2012 and January 2013, showing a growth in its subscriber base of almost 300%. This reflects the company's international expansion as well as the rollout of the services its supports across new devices. Omnifone currently powers music services like Blackberry BBM, Sony Music Unlimited and Rara.com.Omnifone's announcement also contained some interesting data on user behaviour. For example, 79% of its subscribers consumed music from devices in the home, whilst only 21% did so on portable devices. This is a diametrically opposite figure to that revealed by music streaming service Rdio just a few weeks ago when it announced that 80% of its users were on mobile. The discrepancy though is probably rooted in the fact that Omnifone-powered Sony Music Unlimited likely sees most of its subscriptions come from users of PlayStations, Smart TVs and Blu-ray players which are of course home-based systems.
The company's user-base is also very Android-focused with the Google platform claiming 76% of streamed mobile music, iOS lagging far behind at 24%.
In an interview with Digital Music Trends at Midem 2013 Omnifone's Chief Content Officer Jez Bell maintained that one of Omnifone's next steps is developing a suite of APIs that will be accessible to smaller companies looking for potentially for off-the-shelf licensing solutions. This option “if cost effective" could considerably lower the barrier of entry for new music tech companies that right now are finding it too costly and time-consuming to get into the licensing game directly, whilst at the same increasing the reach and influence of Omnifone itself.
(Andrea Leonelli)