I seem to have made a mistake in a recent post about Japan, with respect to its broadband market…
Lars from WirelessWatch (the source of the story) commented:
Note: Japan’s Internet and PC Users as a percentage of population (contrary to popular belief) has been very much the same as – or even better than – the adoption rate in European country’s like France, Germany and the U.K. dating back to 2001.
Ben Ziskind, CTO of mobZilla, e-mailed me with the same info on broadband uptake, but also had some comments about chaku-uta.
One thing I wanted to bring to your attention (that I haven’t seen covered in any of the press on the success of the Chaku-uta Full) is how it is being marketed. I’ve been told by Japanese natives that the literal translation of Chaku-uta is “ringing tone”, or “the sound the phone makes when it rings.” While I haven’t been over to Japan since the service was released, it seems to me it may be being marketed (and more importantly used) more as a next-generation ringtone service than as a true “music” service. To me that would imply that the Chaku-uta might merely be eating into part of the ringtone market as an evolutionary service as opposed to being something which is revolutionizing the mobile music space.
When I think “mobile music service”, I’m looking for something that fundamentally changes the way consumers listen to music – creating usage from the handset that is more akin to other forms of portable audio – iPod, MP3, Walkman, portable CD player or radio, etc. The Melon service in South Korea seems to be having an impact in that country. I haven’t seen any coverage that would lead me to believe that Chaku-uta is doing a similar thing in Japan.
He’s right, of course…from my understanding chaku-uta are marketed more like realtones than full-track song downloads, despite the fact they are full-length songs (from what I’ve read, obviously I’m still no expert on Japan). So questions arise as to whether chaku-uta have been successful because they are marketed as ringtones rather than songs, and whether it’s common practice for people to buy them as part of a music library.
Russell Buckley from Mobhappy has something to say on the recent Bluetooth advertising of Coldplay’s new album.
Another way of looking at this story is that they spammed 85% of the people involved in the promotion.
The way this system works is that they contact everyone within range with their phone in “discoverable” mode and send them a Bluetooth message asking if they’d like to download some files – in this case promoting Coldplay.
Russell knows the mobile market pretty well, but I disagree with him on this, and with his later comparison to e-mail (“It’s like anyone with an email application on their computer is opting in to email spam”). E-mail is a non-real time communication service, whereas Bluetooth is a short-range data transfer technology, used to transfer files wirelessly. In which case I see know reason to have it in ‘discoverable’ mode unless you’re actively trying to transfer a file to or from somebody. Of course, it is also increasingly being used to connect devices wirelessly, like mobile phones to Bluetooth headsets, and if it needs to be in discoverable mode for this I can see the beginnings of a major problem — exactly the problem Russell is talking about. However, this marketing technology is spreading and is not going to go away, and also has several real benefits to both marketers and consumers. Maybe a setting could be added on whether people wanted to receive commercial offers like movie ringtone/wallpaper promotions or free music?
Finally, John Freeman had a short comment on Steve Jobs’ attitude to mobile music…
Surprised by Jobs feelings re. digital music. More people particularly in lower income brackets have access to mobile phones than they do PCs and therefore it’s actually a far more likely way for them to download music.
Comments have been disabled for this post