Vodafone launches a new service using MySpace as a eight months campaign

BrandRepublic.com, the website to publish the news, says:

Nick Reid, the head of sales of MySpace UK, said: “MySpace has worked with Vodafone to develop a bespoke platform to engage with our audience and offer them something we know they want. This deal provides us with a great opportunity to allow users and musicians to express themselves, discover new talent and get closer to bands and their music.”

Well, in my humble opinion, I’m sure it’s going to be a huge success. First of all, Vodafone won’t have to face copyright charges, which is a good thing, this small details will be handled by MySpace. Cool, huh? Yeah, well it’s going to be interesting. I haven’t seen the campaign’s details and what tracks will users going to be using for remixing, but it might be pretty restrictive.

Why not their own platform?

Let’s say it’s called laziness. But if I were to work for Vodafone as a marketing manager or something similar, I would have engaged for a exclusive Vodafone platform. I know there’s this copyright issue, but as long as people don’t download tracks, that shouldn’t be a big problem. You can’t charge for listening to a track, but in the end, people could download even as ringtones and pay a small fee.

The music industry is chaotic right now because of this internet continous expanding. New business models should be developed and lots of investments in education should be made. But who cares about that when the simplest way to do is going for a court trial on people who download and share music?

Better possibilities on their own

Vodafone has great social networking potential. Vodafone websites have huge traffic and they already have mp3 download services working for years, at least as “ringtone download centers”. Now, going with MySpace give them what? Access to some bands PR workers, right? OK, and to some artists. But wouldn’t have been cool to go for the most popular artists on MySpace and give them another opportunity to promote?

I can see that Vodafone is trying to engage a new client base, but in financial crisis times, all companies try to keep their clients, so fidelisation is what matters right now. For example, in Europe, Orange gives pre-pay clients a lot of new opportunities to spend their credit. With a few euros payed each month, they get lots of free minutes and text messages. So those clients won’t migrate to Vodafone. They’ll stay where they are.

Basically, measuring Vodafone’s success right now is about getting feedback, and not clients. What Vodafone could have done is to give free minutes to people that subscribe, to give bonuses to new clients that buy their services through this new website about music, to find sponsors like Nokia, that launched the “Xpress Music” phone and, eventually, to co-brand this campaign and use the phones as prizes for the best remixes.

Why I dislike the cooperation between Vodafone and MySpace? Because it’s like Nike launching the Nike+ campaign using Facebook. Plus, MySpace is really popular in the US. Why should Europeans go to MySpace? Oh, well, what’s with this strategies nowadays…