Billboard (which partners with the parent company of Moconews to publish BillboardPostPlay) has announced its plans to move into the mobile market in partnership with mForma. It’s not completely clear whether the new service will actually offer music downloads, but I assume it will since its already offering an easy way to get mobile downloads through its charts.
“Billboard Mobile is one of the industry’s first real attempts to address the problem through intelligent, contextual merchandising. Using Billboard’s easily digestible top-10 charts, music news, and artists’ fan sites as its foundation, Mforma built the application to enable consumers to easily see what’s popular, what’s getting radio airplay, and which songs are available for purchase as ringtones. When it’s released — sometime in the next 60 days, according to Mforma chairman Dan Kranzler — Mforma will try to find consumers willing to pay a monthly subscription fee to learn what everyone else is buying.”
The article then goes on to take a dig at the big players in the industry, saying “ringtones have become a multibillion-dollar market, despite the ignorance of music labels, the intransigence of carriers, and the truly painful process of getting content onto phones at all”.
Related stories:
–Mobile Music & DRM
–Napster & Dwango Pair Up To Offer Ringtones
–British Youth Spend
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