July 27, 2006
SayNow's Voice Services
In a previous post, I speculated that VoIPing for profit might be something musicians could consider, and that fans would love. This speculation was based on a successful promo that ColdPlay and Skype offered recently, where band members spoke via Skype to the two young women who won the contest.
If you've followed some of the goings on of top popstars and actors, just a couple of years ago, fans were paying for daily voice messages from stars. The voicemails were accessible through a pay-per-minute phone number, and contained the daily goings-on of the star, as well as goofy messages telling the fans how much they were loved.
Well, someone got smart and realized the both the value and the (potential) profit in having musicians be in touch with their fans using voice services and the Internet. SayNow is a free service that lets musicians record voice messages, and for fans to respond to them. SMS messages are used as alerts to indicate new messages from a musician. Fan and musician phone numbers remain private.
The real killer feature, at least for musicians, is a map and head count of where fans are calling from, presumably based on their cell phone number (or possibly their IP address). Imagine the marketing tool that this could be turned into, if a few more layers of web service were added in - surveys, friendly VoIP chats, pre-purchase of tickets, CDs/ DVDs, merch, etc. While SayNow seems to be aimed at Myspace musicians, there seems to be no restriction in that regard, and no reason why only musicians can take advantage of this service.
Odeo is not the same thing, but combining it with twttr (SMS) and Hellodeo (video mail) gives you similar basic functionality. (Warning: Hellodeo displays recently recorded videos, and someone's already put prawn videomail up there.)
Still, none of this is true VoIP, yet I think SayNow shows that there's a potential market for VoIP calls between celebrities and fans, provided that various safeguards are put in place to protect privacy or other situations. I mean, I'd really hate to have Carmen Electra Skyping me every hour, telling me that Dave Navarro finally succumbed to Rockstar Supernova's charming host Brooke Burke. Yeah, right.
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