Mobile Music Best Practices — The Untold Story

This is a pretty good analysis of the mobile music market in Japan, and gives a couple of suggestions for purveyors of music to retain customers in the new age of full-track (chaku-uta) sales…although it fails to mention how third parties can obtain the rights to the music from the record labels in the first place. Anyway, the article says people pay for two things: Trust (it is important to build consumer trust in the brand so that customers remain loyal through changes in content) and convenience (the analogy is made between convenience stores and supermarkets). It goes on to predict that mobile music will replace internet music…which I think it misguided given current industry trends. Sure, convenience stores are thriving, but they’re not replacing supermarkets.
The other issue is that Japan could be a unique case (although I’m no expert on how Japanese people use technology, so if I’m wrong let me know). I have heard that there are relatively few people in Japan with a home-based internet connection, making the mobile internet more attractive. While there are many more mobile phones than computers in the world, that’s because they are a lot cheaper…many people won’t be able to afford the cost of downloading a lot of music over the mobile network.
Still, like convenience stores, the mobile music market is booming — at least in Japan. Chaku-uta represents 20 percent of mobile music sales (the equivalent of US$200 million)…”The other 80 percent (~US$800 million) corresponds to the estimated 2 billion MIDI-based ring tones that are still being sold.” The market for Chaku-uta is expected to grow to US$300 million in 2005, serving more than 30 million Chaku-uta-enabled phones (there are currently 20 million Chaku-uta phones).
Related stories:
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