CTIA: Put Another Dime In The Jukebox

Mobile music is big! Huge! It will save the music industy! And the carriers! Of course, until that happens there’s a lot of arguing about what is going to work and not work, such as at this CTIA panel. “It’s a revenue stream for each other,” said Paul Reddick of Sprint Nextel. “We think the immediacy of downloads is something consumers will value, but it wont canabalise other downloads.” From the point of view of attorney Fred Davis “The technology community tries to decide what solutions the music industry needs to follow and the music industry has its own concerns, and nowhere are they discussing this.”
In fact, all the arguments revolve around one thing — price — and the blame for that can be laid squarely at Apple’s feet.
“Everyone acts like 99c is the eleventh commandment, that it is carved in stone somwhere… our view is let the consumer decide,” said Michael Nash from Warner Music. “Despite the many ways we can lose our business such as xingtones there has been an explosion in growth of ringtones.” Of course, the customer will decide. They’ve already pretty clearly chosen iTunes, but if labels and carriers can offer something better customers will go there. So there’s a lot of talk about bundles (or clusters) of music content, music recognition services and so on, but so far no carrier has indicated a willingness to compete with iTunes on price. Well, almost none…as Rafat reported earlier Amp’d CEO Peter Adderton said Amp’d would launch songs for 99c, and derided all the obfuscation from others in the industry about bundling ringtones and so on, bumping up the price…he claimed kids would see right through that and turn back to piracy. And in the third corner is Brad Duea, president of Napster, arguing that subscription services are the only way to go and the only innovation happening in mobile music. (“Put another dime in the jukebox? You don’t have to!”)
The whole side-loading vs downloading issue is based on whether carriers will be able to force customers to buy music over the mobile network, and so far they seem to think the answer is no — although they believe customers will buy some music over the network if given the choice.
“I appreciate what Apple and Motorola have done, it really creates awareness,” said Reddick. “But I don-t think its the game changing event, that will be downloads.” Of course, Alberto Moriondo from Motorola jumped to the manufacturers defence, saying: “Motorola is not really involved in that part of the chain, its between apple and the carrier.”
I think this whole debate is going to go on for a long time…although I did think the idea of allowing unlimited downloads for a fixed price but only have room on the handset for 8-10 songs and therefore driving data revenue was novel…

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