Should be music to operators’ ears

by: admin Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

Rating: try listening

M:Metrics has just published figures on the mobile music market for the first time – reflecting this sector’s growing importance.

This is what it found: “ownership of musicphones (defined as phones that are capable of music storage and playback) is growing rapidly across the United States and Western Europe. The UK boasts the highest penetration of these devices, at 40 percent, followed by Germany (34%), Italy (32%), Spain (29%) and France (23%). While the US lags these markets, with only 17% (33 million) of mobile subscribers owning a musicphone, it has shown impressive growth in the past year: a 385% increase from January 2006 to January 2007.

So, at the risk of stating the obvious, it looks like audio is becoming the killer mobile app. However, operators are missing a highly lucrative trick – mobile podcasts.

While innovative companies in the US, such as UpSnap and Mobilcast, are charging per minute to listen to podcasts on the hoof, delivering them through those old faithfuls SMS as the payment mechanism and either phone calls or voicemail as the delivery means, operators haven’t got a clue.

In the UK 3 includes podcasts in its X-Series offering, but delivers them by streaming, as a data service. Why? This is unnecessarily complicated and prone to all sorts of problems, while operator dorks elsewhere are charging on a subscription basis when people would pay for what they want as they go.

Has there ever been an industry that is so good at screwing up viable revenue streams as mobile. You show it a way to please customers and make money, it does something else. All suggestions gratefully received – a bottle of champagne to the one we like best.

An anlysis of 3 X-Series podcasts, MSN and Yahoo! Go is in next months issue of The Mobile Search Analyst.