Myxer today announced that it has acquired 20 million users, who average 55 million downloads per month – roughly 21 downloads every second. It claims that it’s current total of over 350 million downloads since launch makes it the mobile webs largest content community.
Who are these Myxer peole anyway?
Myxer is an ad-supported mobile content service. Almost everything you can download from the site is free. Myxer focuses mainly on mobile ringtones, and provides a good set of tools that musicians can use to create and distribute ringtones from their own music. Myxer provides open APIs and widgets so that artists can integrate the service directly into their own blogs or websites, or from their Myspace and Facebook pages.
From the release:
“With our ever-increasing free content catalog, new functionality like our recently introduced send-to-friend feature and the growing consumer trend away from expensive subscription services to ad-supported offerings, Myxer continues to experience explosive growth,” said Myk Willis, CEO of Myxer.
What we think?
Myxer is one of those exceptions that proves a point. The Mobile Entertainment Forum Business Confidence Index from Mobile World Congress showed that the entertainment industries confidence in ringtones was at an all-time low. No one really expects ringtones to go anywhere from here. With richer forms of content available on all side, including video ringtones, the ringtone is expected to slip quietly into the dark night. But Myxer has a strong community element to it’s service. It focuses heavily on bringing it’s users and musician-clients closer together. Myxer has become closer to a advertising channel for independent artists, releasing 30-second snippets of songs for free, to draw new listeners in. It just goes to show why social networking is such a buzz phrase now. A healthy community can support any service.
“It focuses heavily on bringing it’s users and musician-clients closer together.”
Don’t you mean “It focuses heavily on giving end-users top 40 branded ringtones for free by pretending that it’s a ‘community’”?
If musicians knew they were being ripped off, I”m sure they would be unhappy about it.
It’s not hard to find branded content on Myxer…so why are you taking their bait that it’s an advertising channel and not a warez site?