Sony Corp. said it is shutting down its $10-a-month Music Unlimited at the end of March, four years after launching it in the U.S. The streaming service, one of the biggest in Japan, is integrated into Sony’s PlayStation consoles and has counted mostly PlayStation users among its subscribers.
In terms of musical content and price, Music Unlimited is indistinguishable from competitors including Spotify AB, Google Inc. ’s All Access, Apple Inc. ’s Beats Music, Rdio Inc., Rhapsody and Deezer, all of which offer more or less the same 30 million songs.
Sony didn’t disclose its subscriber count but Music Unlimited had just north of 100,000 paying subscribers as of the second half of last year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Spotify—which boasts the music-streaming world’s biggest paying subscriber base at 15 million, plus another 45 million active users of its free service—will now power the music for PlayStation users in 41 markets, in a new partnership with Sony Network Entertainment International called PlayStation Music.
At least one Sony executive had predicted that a shakeout was inevitable. In 2012, before Apple launched its free iTunes Radio service, Michael Aragon —Sony’s vice president and general manager of global digital video and music services—told The Wall Street Journal that “it’s going to be a brutal business and there’s probably going to be some consolidation.”
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