@ Contenido Movil: The Price Of Mobile Music

There’s talk about selling full track songs in Latin America, which is kind of complicated by the fact that it’s still such a new service in the US. Nicholas Montes, VP of sales and marketing at AG Interactive, said that full track downloads in the US is going to succeed or not based on pricing, and added that aggregators weren’t involved much. “In terms of full-track downloads there’s not much of a role for us to play as independent aggregators because the carriers are doing deals directly with the labels and…well…They’re both greedy and there’s not a lot of money there.” Meanwhile, the labels are trying to convince aggregators that they really do want to work with them.
In terms of Latin America companies are looking at offering the service, especially where there are the latter network deployments such as EV-DO. Tony Bernard, VP network services at 9Squared, told me that the company is going for first mover advantage and launching full tracks on the EV-DO networks, and while the initial market is small it is expected to grow. The pricing model is still to be determined and will depend on what the labels want and what the market is willing to pay — I think there’s a reasonable chance there’ll be some discrepancy in these two figures. He said that even though Sprint and Verizon have been blasted by analysts for the price they charge for music downloads they are doing a service in setting expectations on price, although those expectations aren’t what people want. The public outcry is likely to bring the price down somewhat, although probably not to the 99c range I’m guessing. Bernard is of the opinion that the 99c price isn’t going to be around much longer — he doubts that the labels will renew their licensing deals with Apple in the same form…they’ll use the opportunity to try to bring in variable pricing.
There could be an advantage for local independent labels in LatAm which can offer songs cheaper than the imported stuff…

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