Why does 20 seconds cost more than the full track?
Researching mobile music downloads for a completely different story, it struck GoMo News that music content owners may just have adopted a completely inappropriate business model when it comes to attacking the mobile market. The prime example here is ringtones where the asking price for a typical chart ringtone is £2. Compare that to a regular MP3 music download which costs between 89 pence and £1.69. The music industry evens assigns mobile MP3 purchasers unlimited access to their content via their PC, dedicated music player or even more smartphones. That’s sufficient financial incentive to entice consumers to master the not-so-dark arts of creating a decent ringtone from the full track version. GoMo News would humbly suggest that music content owners look carefully at how they bundle their content.For example, there are so many free ringtone generating apps available today, that even the most naïve PC user could create a passable ringtone.
Those who purchase Motorola’s full version of MediaLink PC software, for instance, will soon discover that it offers a superb tool for ringtone generation with very little effort on behalf of the smartphone owner.
At £2 a throw for a ‘genuine’ ringtone, the £25 cost of a great tool like MediaLink would soon pay for itself.
What the music content owners need to do is put together a much more mobile-friendly package.
For instance, how about a bundle where for a single payment, the consumer can purchase a chart music track that not only plays on their smartphone but also comes with a range of extra mobile related goodies?
The best bundle would surely be to purchase a chart single for a one-off price that includes the ringtone version and – perhaps, controversially – the ringback tone version as well.
And throw in a wallpaper and a music video for good measure. The kind of thing which Nokia has done with One Direction (see our previous story here).
If a consumer gets the smartphone friendly version of an MP3 music track which gets the ringbacktone version and ringtone version thrown in for the same price.
Then – and only then – might they consider paying around the £2 mark which regular ringtone suppliers seem to want to charge.
