That vision for that plan was conveyed to RAIN News in October, 2014, and focused on three main pillars of music consumption — lean-back radio listening, on-demand music access, and music purchasing. The company began a spate of deal-making with leading electronica labels to set the stage from a rights management perspective, announcing the first agreements within a few weeks of releasing the initial vision. Next came a redesign of the user experience in January 2015. The on-demand listening was inaugurated in June of last year.
These changes resulted in a 95% growth of first-time monthly subscribers in January of this year, compared to a year earlier. During all of 2015, the average revenue per paid subscriber was up 10%.
The track purchasing feature is available to all users, free (ad-supported) and Premium (no ads). A shopping cart icon makes purchasing a one-click affair for users who register payment information. The option does not appear throughout the entire streaming library, though; only some portion of tracks you hear in DI’s dozens of Radio Channels are licensed for purchase and on-demand Premium listening. the price is $1.29 per track, and the sound quality is 320k MP3 — not technically a hi-rez format, as MP3 is always a compressed file, but 320k is indistinguishable from higher resolutions for many people, even in a top-quality listening system.
“By integrating all three major music consumption modes within a single platform, Digitally Imported is finally alleviating our industry’s largest and most longstanding pain points,” said Eloy Lopez, President of Digitally Imported. “Digitally Imported is helping to pioneer a new breed of music service with a value that is greater than the sum of its parts.”