7Digital marked its seventh birthday yesterday (albeit quite a few months after the company’s actual seventh birthday) by revealing some interesting stats and announcing some new developments.
Delivering an overview of both the wider digital market and his own company, 7Digital CEO Ben Drury revealed just how important mobile download sales have become in the last year thanks to the growth in smartphone usage and increased bandwidth availability for many mobile users.
7Digital, of course, has deals in place with various mobile phone makers, Samsung and Blackberry in particular, and also offers an Android app. As a result 44% of the company’s sales now come through mobile devices, compared to 1% last year, a huge percentage increase, all the more significant given Drury confirmed PC-based sales also went up in the same year.
One of the big announcements yesterday also centred on mobile, with news that 7Digital will be making downloads available via Windows Phones in 2012. Says Drury: “We’re continuing to see demand from customers for access to their music on all their devices, regardless of the manufacturer or operating system. With the launch of our Windows Phone app, we’re continuing to work towards the realisation of our vision to provide anytime anywhere access to music for our customers”.
The ‘anytime anywhere’ ethos – ie providing music to any device or operating system – has always been key to 7Digital’s business, and is obviously a key distinguishing factor between Drury’s company and digital music market leader Apple.
And that “being device agnostic” thing featured heavily in Drury’s presentation yesterday, he predicting that Amazon’s move into tablets and Google’s continued promotion of the Android OS and purchase earlier this year of Motorola would likely make the other two big players in digital content increasingly gear their services to their own software and devices.
Drury: “7Digital is ‘platform agnostic’ and by working closely with Microsoft on its Windows devices we are closer to our goal of being able to give our customers access to their entire music collection on all of their devices, any time they want to access it”.
Sections: Digital | Tags: 7Digital, Ben Drury, Microsoft
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