Week in Tech: Week in Tech: A room with a Vue, a new Lumia and a big Spotify rival

It's a feast for the eyes and ears

It's been a big week for music: MTV held its European Music Awards in Glasgow, Taylor Swift told Spotify to sod off and Google announced YouTube Music Key, which is different from Google Play Music but which includes Google Play Music. No, we don't think that makes sense either.

It wasn't all about the bass this week: we also got the newest Nexus, Samsung's brilliantly odd Galaxy Note Edge, a TV station for PlayStations and the chance to see some penguins in virtual reality. That can only mean one thing: it's week in tech!

It's official: YouTube Music Key, Google's latest music subscription service, will launch in the next few days. It's a direct competitor to the likes of Spotify and Pandora and while there's a free bit, the important part is the $9.99/£9.99 monthly subscription. That delivers an ad-free listening experience with local caching and a bundled Google Play Music subscription, and it's likely to have the execs at Spotify calling Google terrible names.

YouTube Music Key wasn't the only blow for Spotify this week. Taylor Swift pulled her albums from the service. That's because "Taylor Swift can walk on water," Gary Marshall says: "For an artist capable of selling 1.3 million albums in a week, something nobody's done since Eminem in 2002, streaming is a pretty rubbish Plan B." Spotify, you'll be amazed to discover, disagrees.

Good news for anyone who fancies sitting around with half a dustbin on their head: the Samsung Gear VR headset is coming in December, and with a price of US$199 (£126, AU$228) for the standalone model it isn't too pricey - although you'll need to supply your own Galaxy Note 4, which ups the cost a tad.

Is it any good? Marc Chacksfield and Michael Rougeau have been using it to watch virtual reality penguins, and they're cautiously impressed: bar a few interface issues and the fact it only works with one smartphone, it's an interesting and potentially brilliant device.

It's here, we've got it and it's good: yep, we're talking about the Google Nexus 6, Android Lollipop's flagship phone. It's bigger and badder than the iPhone 6 Plus, says Matt Swider, although it may be a little too big for anyone who isn't actually a giant - and the Samsung Galaxy Note is probably a better device.

Lollipop doesn't just mean new phones. It means new wearables too, and Jeff Parsons has the inside info on what Google's bringing to a wrist near you. We'll see Material Design make its way to wearables, battery improvements and some useful accessibility options among other goodies.

From 28 November, Samsung fans in the UK will be able to wrap their digits around the firm's distinctly odd Samsung Galaxy Note Edge. The device, which is essentially a Galaxy Note with an extra bit of screen bent around the right hand side, is unlike anything else on the market - and it has the horsepower to ensure it's not a case of screen over substance.

Microsoft has unveiled the first Lumia to appear without a Nokia badge, the Lumia 535. It's an affordable handset rather than a flagship, and so far Microsoft is prioritising the markets in China, Hong Kong and Bangladesh. The UK should get it in early 2015.

Sony has unveiled PlayStation Vue, a new cloud-based TV service that hopes to replace your cable and satellite TV. It's coming in beta form to PS4 and PS3 later this month, and while it's US-only at first the plan is to roll it out to PlayStations everywhere before turning its attention to iPads and other handhelds. Around 75 channels have already signed up.

The Firefox web browser is 10, and its proud parent Mozilla is imagining what the web might look like in another decade. The answer may well be virtual reality: just stick on an Oculus Rift, install the VR-enabled build of Firefox and you can see the web like you've never seen it before. Just imagine how annoying the pop-up ads will be.

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Gary Marshall: Taylor Swift is too smart for Spotify

Superstars make more money from sales than streaming.

According to reports, Taylor Swift is doing something really dumb, and we don't mean dating members of One Direction. The pop sensation's decision to pull her albums from Spotify means she's missing out on thousands of dollars in royalties, and she's been depicted as a kind of singing King Canute trying to turn back the waves of musical progress.

Those reports are wrong.

If, like me, you've spent hours this week trying to get Taylor Swift tickets for your kids, you'll know that Swift and her management are fantastically good at making money. Between the fan club presale, the venue presale, the American Express presale, the Ticketmaster Platinum presale, the sponsor presale and the VIP ticket packages, it's never been easier to spend a frighteningly large sum of money on going to a gig.

Swift and her people are very smart. Streaming 1989 on Spotify wouldn't be. Here's why.

Like most things in the world, you can explain the problem with the help of the excellent 80s popsters The Human League. Their (Keep Feeling) Fascination was on the radio the other day, and I realised that I didn't own that particular slice of perfect pop - so I headed to iTunes to buy the band's best-of.

And then I remembered I had a Spotify account, so I streamed it from that instead. That decision still generates money for the band, but it's a fraction of what they'd get from a sale.

If you're an in-demand new artist with an in-demand new record, streaming isn't the best way to make money.

Comparing streaming royalties to actual album sales is a tough business - I'll leave that to the excellent Ian Betteridge, who's posted a great analysis of some seriously bad reporting here. But the short version is this: artists such as Taylor Swift make a big pile of cash from album sales and a tiny amount from streaming, and if people can stream the record on Spotify most of them won't buy the albums.

If you were a megastar trying to maximise revenue, you'd do something like this: you'd pull your albums from the most popular music streaming service (but not YouTube, because you're not stupid) and keep them off until CD and download sales started to die. When that happened, you'd change your mind about streaming and generate an income from the people who won't buy your records but who still want to listen to them.

The thing about streaming is that while it's good for consumers and marginally better for artists than piracy (better to get a fraction of a percent of something rather than 100% of nothing) it's pretty crap for generating money unless you're a superstar.

And if you are a superstar, you've got devoted fans who'll happily buy your records, so you don't need to rely on streaming for your income. Taylor Swift could charge much less than £61.60 for the cheap seats and £350 for the VIP ones on her UK tour, but why should she if people will pay it?

That's what's going on with streaming. For an artist capable of selling 1.3 million albums in a week, something that nobody's done since Eminem in 2002, streaming is a pretty rubbish plan B. So as long as Swift can sell records, that's what she'll do. Swift isn't trying to turn back the streaming tide. It's just that unlike other artists, Taylor Swift can walk on water.

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Deezer, entering US, will sound like Spotify, act like Netflix

The subscription-music service you've probably never heard of is bigger than all its brethren except Spotify. Now it's diving into the US, not with a splash but a ripple. North American CEO Tyler Goldman explains why.

Tyler Goldman, the North American CEO of Deezer, is leading the company's charge into its 183rd country, the US. Deezer

The US is the great white whale of the music business, and Deezer is aiming to snag it with a bunch of small hooks rather than one shining harpoon.

Deezer, a subscription streaming-music service that began in France in 2007, has 16 million monthly active listeners and 5 million paying subscribers. That puts it behind only Spotify, with 10 million paid members, in its category of services that let you rent all the music you want for a monthly fee. Deezer has risen through the ranks by blanketing the globe -- it's available in 182 countries, in a world that has fewer than 200 nations -- while steering clear of the biggest markets out there.

Now Deezer is entering the US, the largest market for music by sales, and it's doing it in stealth mode.

"What's strange would be to keep doing what other services have done with very limited traction," said Deezer North American Chief Executive Tyler Goldman in an interview. The dozen music services in the US have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to be generally available to the mainstream public and "have no subscribers," he said.

So Deezer doesn't have a publicly available product for anyone in the US to try. It's entering the US first through a partnership it formed last month with speaker-maker Sonos and then through a similar partnership with Bose that it struck last week. To Sonos owners, Deezer is offering "Elite" streaming-service with CD-quality music streams priced regularly at $19.99 a month, currently $9.99 a month in a promotion for those who sign up for a full year and in a $14.99 deal by paying month-to-month. To Bose SoundTouch and SoundLink owners, Deezer is offering a "Premium Plus" service for $4.99 a month, another discount from its going rate of $9.99 a month.

Goldman wouldn't specify how many members Deezer has attracted in the few weeks it's been available in the US through the speaker-maker deals, but he said it was a level that's "material relative to what other services have already, who have been in the US for many years."

Generally, subscription streaming music is growing rapidly, with giants like Google, Amazon and Apple jumping into the fray alongside hot startups like Spotify, but overall it remains small. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, paid subscriptions grew 23 percent in the first half of the year compared with a year earlier, but their total value -- at $371 million -- was only 17 percent of the $2.2 billion in revenue derived from digital music.

Goldman attributes that limited penetration to dissatisfaction.

"There are only 30 million global music subscribers today, which would reflect that users are not that satisfied to the point that they're willing to pay," he said.

However, the model of subscription streaming is new and a stark difference from how consumers have been paying for music for decades -- individual payments for ownership, be it of records, CDs or downloads. Limited traction is as much a result of consumer unfamiliarity as anything else.

That's the reason why Deezer's approach of tackling bite-size market segments in the US is so important, Goldman said.

"Instead of saying 'I'm going to figure out how to do that for 3 billion people'...I'm going to figure it out in groups of hundreds of millions," he said. "There may be 20 million to 25 million audio enthusiasts in the US out of 300-plus million [people], but globally that number is closer to 100 million. Maybe other companies aren't doing this because they're not looking at this on a global basis."

The executive said Deezer will launch to a number of other US subsegments during the next 12 months preceding a wide release to the general public. Some of the groupings will be "much bigger" than the audio enthusiast category that it's pursuing initially with Bose and Sonos.

This isn't the classic road map Deezer has followed to launch in other countries, all of which are smaller. The company traditionally will tailor its service for a particular country, market to its tastes and set up a partnership with a leading telecom provider there to distribute.

That approach, however, doesn't translate well to the US. The population is so large and diverse that music tastes and preferences run a much wider gamut than in the majority of the countries where Deezer has expanded.

And while partnering with mobile carriers has been a successful tactic not only for Deezer abroad but also for Spotify, the strategy has largely fallen flat in the US. Beats Music, now part of Apple, launched in January with a splashy deal with AT&T, the second-biggest carrier with 110 million wireless customers at the end of last year. But by May, Beats Music had only 250,000 paying members.

So for strategic inspiration in the US, Deezer is looking elsewhere. "If you look at Netflix or you look at Facebook or any category, they generally started with more narrow categories," Goldman said. Netflix started with laser discs in the Bay Area and Facebook began with one school for its social network, he said.

"A lot of people wrote off Netflix early on," he said. "Netflix showed they were able to create in their bundle of offerings a tremendous amount of value. Deezer is on its path to doing that, and that's why Deezer is going to be a giant winner in this category."

Joan E. Solsman Joan E. Solsman is a senior writer for CNET focused on digital media. She previously wrote for Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal. She bikes to get almost everywhere in New York City and has been doored only once. See full bio

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Philips Android TVs will be the first to offer Spotify Connect

Tuning the TV

Android-powered Philips TVs will be the first to support Spotify Connect, letting you stream music from a mobile device straight to the television.

From September, Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to stream music on their compatible Philips Smart TV, in a move that will integrate the music service more into our homes.

And Spotify tells us that Philips is just the first in a "long line" of smart TVs that will be arriving with Connect support.

Because Connect draws on internet connectivity directly, the tunes will keep pumping even if your phone or tablet goes out of range, or you have to take a call - making it better than other connectivity options, such as Bluetooth.

On top of that, Spotify has announced some new Connect partners for home speakers, including Bose, Panasonic and Gramofon. More will be announced at IFA 2014, Spotify tells us, so keep an eye on this space.

And as for all you Windows Phone users, don't forget that Spotify has just opened up free streaming to your platform.

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