Gideon Spanier: Blinkbox hits right note for off-song Tesco

Tesco is hardly rock ’n’ roll, but the UK’s biggest supermarket has just reached an unlikely music milestone.

Britons have listened to one billion songs through its streaming service Blinkbox Music since its launch in June 2013.

“We’re probably the fastest-growing music service no one’s ever heard of,” says Blinkbox Music managing director Mark Bennett in his Farringdon office full of music posters. “We term it the easiest way to listen to music on your mobile for free.”

Almost 95% of Blinkbox Music users are accessing the audio service on a mobile app rather than its website — helped by the fact Blinkbox is pre-installed on Tesco’s Hudl tablet.

The advertising-funded service has over a million registered users, with an ad-free version costing £1 a week or £4.33 a month. That compares to market leader Spotify’s 40 million global users, with subscribers paying £9.99 monthly.

Blinkbox users can pick channels or “stations” based on specific genres, and can create their own stations, based on favourite artists or types of music. Blinkbox’s algorithm “learns” about each user’s tastes to improve the selection from a library of 12 million songs.

“When you create your own station, it gets to know you better,” explains Bennett. Reaching a billion streams is “a really cool milestone to hit”, he adds. “You celebrate success.”

Tesco needs success, given its woes in the grocery market, with new chief executive Dave Lewis starting a month early on Monday after another profits warning. But some analysts wonder if the company’s bet on digital technology, with Blinkbox and the Hudl, makes sense when they are “non-core” to its main retailing business.

Lewis’s predecessor, Philip Clarke, championed Blinkbox as one of his first initiatives. He bought the TV and film streaming start-up in 2011 and added music and e-books, while keeping the business in east London to maintain its tech culture.

It seemed logical to Clarke because Tesco was a major retailer of physical DVDs, CDs and books and he wanted to stop customers defecting to Amazon.

Tesco also made the point that entertainment excites consumers’ passions in a way that washing powder or baked beans never will — something Lewis, a former marketer at consumer goods giant Unilever and non-executive director of pay-TV firm Sky, is likely to appreciate.

Blinkbox is unashamedly middle of the road. It is not aimed at diehard music fans, and seeks to be an alternative to Spotify, Deezer, Apple and Google as streaming booms.