How Sony could have saved Music Unlimited with PS4/PS Vita

Sony had launched its Spotify competitor, Music Unlimited, already some years ago but it never really took off. It was one of those “me too” moves big corporations do when they hear noise somewhere. It was a poor functioning service, with poorly designed and engineered apps, poor performance, bugs, bad UX and all you can think of. Someone at Sony probably thought that they could beat their polished competitors just because of being called Sony. Big mistake of course. Sony once more failed, like with Video Unlimited, because of not trying to differentiate their product by making use of something they have that no other competitor does, an ecosystem.

There’s probably other ways the service could have been saved, but I’m going to focus on one specific: games.

Playstation has a big install base with PS3 having sold over 80 million units, PS Vita over 12 million units and PS4 already over 20 million units. Just by installing a decent music streaming service by default on all of these systems you already have a huge user base to start with. Add to that all Xperia smartphones, Vaio laptops and Bravia Smart TVs and you should have a really huge user base.

Most of these devices play games, even Bravia Smart TVs are going to play games now through the promising game streaming service Playstation Now. Being Playstation, and hence games, the most successful of all these Sony products and the one consumers like Sony best for, it only makes sense to leverage this.

Sony could have created a music streaming service that syncs with games in such a way that you can create your own OST for a game. With this I mean a platform where you could define which songs play during battle, which during more peaceful parts, which song plays in which cutsene and at which concrete moment, etc. The game would tell the music streaming service at what volume to play so that the music integrates with the game as if it were its own.

Few users would actually go through the hustle of creating these user-generated OSTs. Like in all content platforms you have a 97% consumers, 3% creators rule. But you don’t need hundreds of OSTs, you need a few well done by passionate people. This way we would have better music in games as it wouldn’t depend on licensing deals solely. The artists would get paid per play, just like Spotify pays their artists 0,007€ per play. And besides having better music from better artists we would have OSTs for different tastes. You’d rather play Dragon Age: Inquisition with heavy metal or with classical music? There’d be an OST for both most probably, appart from the official one.

This could have given a lot of people a reason to subscribe to Sony’s service instead of the competition, since no one else can give this added value. Add a nice interface, good user experience, refactor the whole thing for it to run smoothly and bug-less, get a good catalogue of music fit for movies’/videogames’ OSTs and you have a very clear winner.

Bonus point: If you combine this also with my concept of Crowdfunding on Playstation, but adapted to music and you make it as open as SoundCloud, you’d also get all the uprising musicians to be first on this service.

Nevertheless, I think Sony did a good move partnering up with Spotify instead of keeping their poor service alive, taking into account that they probably wouldn’t have done anything worthwhile with it anyways. I had actually thought of this idea before this partnership happened and I was a bit saddened seeing Sony, a very prominent company in the music space through Sony Music Entertainment, give up. But it was probably for the best. Maybe Microsoft will wake up and do something cool with Xbox Music.