The Star has a piece on music artists releasing ringtones before the corresponding albums and its importance to the industry — some examples, but also some figures on the telco sales. The three local mobile carriers — Maxis, Celcom and DiGi — make a lot of money from mobile music. “The total ringback tone subscriber base (for the three telcos) is 4.3 million people. Each subscriber pays RM3 (US$0.88) per month as a subscription fee…This works out to about RM154.8 million (US$45.26 million) per annum exclusively for the telcos,” said Universal Music Group International’s director of digital for South-East Asia, Loo Yew Ming. “This is more than the total sales (including physical CD sales) for the four major recording labels in 2006, which is around RM100 million (US$29.24 million).” If you compare this to ringtone downloads in Malaysia, which brought in RM15 million (US$4.39 million) for Malaysian record labels, it seems that ringback tones benefit from being copy-resistant.
Singapore-based Soundbuzz has announced results of a study showing that digital music — especially mobile content — will outperform physical CD sales by 2009, and by that year more than a third of all digital music sales will come out of Asia.
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