Tesco to add music into the mix for its Blinkbox service

Mar 5, 2013 - Tesco is to expand its on-demand video service Blinkbox to include music and books later this year. The supermarket chain has poached two high-level executives to head the initiatives. On the music front Mark Bennett will take the lead, he has experience at major labels (EMI, Warner) as well as working with large-scale retailers, having headed Sainsbury’s digital entertainment unit. On the books front Gavin Sathianathan will take charge, has comes from Facebook where he lead the company’s EMEA retail initiatives.

As far as the music service is concerned, Tesco acquired UK digital music startup We7 last year but has so far left the service pretty much unchanged amidst persistent rumors of a Blinkbox integration. The main question remains on how the retail chain is planning to convert We7 to draw in the maximum amount of users in what should be a mainstream and easy-to-use offering.

Although We7 was and continues to be an on-demand service with a subscription model comparable to that of Spotify, Deezer and Rdio, before the acquisition it had shifted its free, ad-based access from on-demand to personalized streaming radio. This could be an interesting entry point for the retailer as in the UK there is a distinct lack of Pandora-like services.

A tricky point for the music offering will be that the on-demand Blikbox video service over the past few months has carried out a large advertising push placing a great deal of emphasis on the lack of a subscription as a positive, differentiating factor from its competitors which include Lovefilm and Netflix. Given the relatively rigid licensing structure music streaming services services operate under it will be interesting to see if it Tesco will be forced to bring subscriptions back into the mix or if it will find an alternative way of making consumers pay for music.



(Andrea Leonelli)