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Mobile music loses its premium placing

Platform: Mobile | Author: Michael Nutley | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 07.12.06

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We know that 72% of children between the ages of 6 and 13 own a mobile phone. But what are they using them for? NMA commissioned specialist social networking company Intuitive Media to find out, and the results will make alarming reading for the music industry.

The general belief used to be that the everything-for-free attitude that dominates the web wouldn't apply to mobile, because people are used to paying for what they get over the phone. This may still be true for older people, but the...

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... next generation of consumers thinks mobile music is free. According to the NMA/Intuitive research, nearly a third of children between the ages of 8 and 13 have shared music via Bluetooth, and nearly half of those who haven't would like to.

This situation will only get worse for the music industry. Mobiles that play music are still in their infancy and penetration is relatively low. In addition, the market for full-track downloads is far from mature, but the more the music industry pushes them, the more it opens the door for illegal sharing.

What's more, the main plank of the music industry's response to illegal web-based file sharing - legal services - seems unlikely to help in the mobile world. One of the key attractions of legal download services is that you know what you're getting; the track you download won't be a spoof or full of viruses. But the nature of Bluetooth means that sharing takes place face to face, which means you're more likely to trust the person you're getting the track from.

However, there's another way of looking at this. As Lord David Puttnam told us back in the spring (NMA 25.05.06), one view is to treat piracy as a cost of sale, as part of the price for building a market. One of the biggest problems facing the music business at the moment is how people discover new music. Sharing with your peers (in the offline sense of that word) is one of the best ways to do that.

The other strand of the discovery problem is that all the context and extra value has been stripped out of the music package by a combination of cost-cutting and chart rules. The music industry needs to find ways to re-introduce this so that, once you've discovered a new act through sharing music with your friends, you want to buy the rest of their work.

Michael Nutley, editor, NMA michael.nutley@centaur.co.uk