September 27, 2008

Maybe not Genius, but pretty good

After a loooooong time I made my first purchase at the iTunes Music Store last Sunday night. Even though I primarily listen to music with Spotify, the Spotify beta hasn't contained recently released music and I wanted to get my hands on a few new songs.

By starting to use iTunes and iTMS I've started to get to know Genius, iTunes music recommendation service. Genius helps with discovery of new songs, which is making my experience better (of course Amazon has done this for ages, so it is not a new idea). It would be very interesting to see how Genius has affected user-behavior and sales. My guess is that Genius might have increased the spend by an average iTunes customer a few percentage points already and as it gets better it can probably reach a 10-20 % improvement (at least).

Genius is the kind of service improvement that can create a lot of value (for customers as well as the firm and its shareholders), but usually doesn't get the same media attention as a company acquiring another company.

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