While people are fine with the idea of buying mobile music (“46 percent of those surveyed agree that they would not buy a mobile unless it can download music”) but few are actually doing so (“11 percent of consumers were already paying for music downloads on their mobile: only half the level that expressed interest in downloading in a similar survey in 2005″) notes Mobile Business. The article covers a lot of issues including speaker quality, the problems with locating music and so on, but ends with the suggestion that the major problem is the business model — there’s too many players looking for a slice of the one pie, and none of them want to take less. For example: “Richard Wheeler, head of music partnerships for Orange, recently told an audience at MusicAlly’s digital music convention in Brighton that … “Placement is based on the margin we get from the labels…Currently, our content is chosen by an editorial team based on song popularity…However, we are considering choosing featured content based upon margin.” If the industry wants to get the mobile music market going it has to stop thinking about the “mobile premium” and start viewing mobile music as a mass market, getting a smaller return per track but for a far larger number of tracks.
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