Hello Birders! It’s the new head bird of Songbird here. My name is Les Schmidt and I took over the top spot at Songbird earlier this year. Now that I’ve found my way around the nest a bit, I thought I’d take this occasion to share a little about the new Songbird that is emerging.

When I came to Songbird, I sat down with our investors, our partners, our employees and our new management team. I talked to people in the music and technology industries and explored many of the over 400 new digital music services that have debuted in the past several years.

After parsing through this enormous amount of input, our team concluded, as many of you probably have as well, that almost everything about the music industry is changing. Music and technology are rapidly innovating and new services are being introduced almost daily. It’s a significantly different world from the way things were when Songbird originally started. And it appears that changes aren’t destined to slow down any time soon. Here are some high-level trends that we distilled. We believe these should drive the focus of Songbird going forward:

• Increasingly, people are listening to music on connected devices (e.g. phones, tablets), not solely PCs
• People are warming up to the idea of using cloud-based services enabling access to their music anywhere (e.g. Google, Amazon, Apple and MP3Tunes)
• More people are subscribing to music streaming services (e.g. Pandora, Spotify, MOG and Rdio)
• Managing your music on the desktop is dominated by iTunes
• YouTube is one of the top locations younger people listen to music (57% according to Nielsen)
• Social music experiences are becoming more important especially as it relates to expressing music interests and understanding your friends’ interests.

The bottom line is that if Songbird continues to primarily focus on the desktop and the associated purchase-download-manage model, we will be increasingly out of sync with changing marketing conditions.

OK, so where should we fly next?

Well, we’ve spent the past few months creating a fundamentally new strategy for both the company and our products. We’re not ready to share all of the details yet, but I can certainly state that we are going to be working on smaller, more focused apps and directly targeting social music experiences for all of you – our “fans”.

We have a lot of ground to cover and we are trying to cover it as quickly as we can. Stay tuned to this blog. As we create the future of Songbird, we’ll be back at you with more news.