BF aknowledge Steamingof some content by various Providers

Yay! My niece is a marketing manager for Spotify. I'll have to thank her!

Well it sounds like it's Switzerland, Germany and Austria only at this time. 

Personally I feel this would hurt sales unless they are really old titles but maybe that's just me. 

Oh. I thought it was Spotify and the just Deezer in Switzerland, Germany and Austria.

I think it's commercial suicide, I pay my streaming service, for unlimited access to basically unlimited amounts of music (and other stuff) less per year than I pay BF on a weekly basis.

Just reading up on how much labels get paid for music streaming (artists get paid a portion of this) the information is very poor, and even those articles that mention number seem to vary wildly. But in 2010 Spotify said it paid between $0.0006 and $0.0084 per stream. In 2013 Rhapsody, apparently one of the better payers is said to pay the artists $0.0019 per stream.

So lets make some gross assumptions:

BF get 3 times as much per track because they are so long
BF get paid for 4 streams per, because that's how many tracks normally make up a story
BF also get paid the top dollar rate (before the above is applied) of $0.0019 per track/stream

That means for an entire story BF get paid $0.0019 times 4 tracks times 3 for length equalling a very generous total of $0.0228 per story streamed.

Now, let's assume the average price of BF download is $13. That means that BF, using these very generous payment assumptions, need 571 people to stream a story to get the same $13.

Now, assuming that none of those 571 people were never ever (and I mean never ever) going to buy the streamed story, then that's an extra $13 in BF's pocket, on the other hand, if only 1 would ever have purchased the release then BF would have broken even.

I guess it comes down to how many will stream and how many of those will then not go on to purchase.

I would imagine it like this:

When you first start, most people have not heard of BF and so represent a new income stream, and indeed exposure means some people become curious and generate more actual sales, so it looks like win win.

Later, as BF release more onto streaming, they loose more sales than it generates and it develops into a loose loose situation.

Later still, and *if* BF can persuade massive number of people to stream their stories, say 1 million, then they can afford to loose 28,000 sales and break even.

But perhaps there is a problem, lets see.

I pay BF around £1600 ($2064) a year, I assume that makes one of their best customers, so lets assume, ignoring people who only make 1 to 5 purchases ever, that the average direct BF customer spends £250 ($322) per year (around 25 downloads per year), if BF were to loose one of these customers because they switched to streaming, BF would need 14,123 streams to recover that lost income. If we assume someone that would otherwise purchase 25 downloads a year, on streaming would stream 100 audio's per year, then BF need to attract an additional 140 customers (who act the same as the one lost customer) to streaming to break even.

So for streaming to be profitable, BF must attract more than 140 new customers per customer they loose to direct purchase.

Now, of course, I am making so many assumptions, and even small changes to some of the numbers could effect these conclusions greatly, but I've been generous in my assumptions towards BF I believe (based on the few and shaky facts I could find) and it seems to me that BF are playing with fire here.

It slightly stuns given the problem they had with torrents that BF are pushing this through before something like purchasable and  transferrable Gift Codes surely a better demand / return for them then a few pence/cent Per DL this will net them?

Regards

mark687

I can't see this hurting sales at all. Big Finish has a very small, loyal customer base and I can't see anyone refusing to buy a title because it can be streamed. If you look at video examples, I've got Amazon Prime and can stream lots of modern Doctor Who for free as part of that. It doesn't stop me buying the titles though.

Big Finish will have tracked the impact of previous ventures into streaming and wouldn't do it if it wasn't income positive.

It's certainly not going to hurt physical sales but I think it will hurt digital sales. That's the difference.

The only reason to buy a digital version of Big Finish is as a back-up for your own personal files. If you can stream titles for a monthly fee then there is less incentive to buy the digital file.

Granted I am sure Big Finish thought this all through and maybe they figured they wouldn't lose their digital customers base but would gain a new customer base through streaming.

I still would hope new titles and extras won't be included to give people an incentive to still buy directly from Big a Finish.



Of course I hope for the best with this venture but it does make me worry a bit!