Slashdot Mirror
Sprint Launchings Music to Mobile Downloads
* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us that Sprint Nextel is looking to take a bite out of Apple's iTunes pie with the upcoming release of the first music download service direct to mobile phones. The service offers the ability to get the song directly to your phone in addition to a high quality version that you can download to your PC. From the article: "The Sprint Music Store will enable subscribers of the third-largest mobile carrier to choose from 250,000 songs from all four major music labels and download them for $2.50 each using phones from either Samsung Electronics or Sanyo Electric."
I heard this same announcement on the radio this morning. My initial reaction was $2.50 a pop?, what the? My next reaction is, I'll never buy music at $2.50 a song, never! (Okay, unless you count Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, or Violin Concerto in D as a song.)
I'm getting the sense that these providers may actually really not care about the phone part of your cell "phone" service. Heck, if the buying public really will pay that kind of money for a song, why bother trying to make money on cell phone technology?
Are any slashdotters willing to pay this price per song? (Not to mention the selection is less than half the other major players.)
Where did I put my Dual 1226? (Not to worry, I know exactly where it is.)
With portable music players being so small in size and no longer carrying any geek stigma for most of the general public, why do mobile-related industries insist that music on your mobile is The Next Big Thing (tm)?
I used to use my n-gage (quiet at the back..) for listening to music, but my GPRS costs for downloading anything were astronomical!
I certainly don't know of anyone that seriously considers mobile phones in their current incarnation as replacements for separate portable music players.
From TFA - "instant gratification of downloading and owning their own personal collection of high-quality songs"
GPRS was definitely not instant when I still used it.
Whilst GPRS may not be used (I can't say I'm entirely sober enough to go over the article with a fine toothed enough comb to tell), if it isn't then that substantially reduces the number of handsets this will be available to. I'm guessing though that they expect us all to buy new handsets for this Amazing New Feature (!!!).
This does catch on, we've had this in Sweden for a little more than a year now, even before iTunes opened over here we had network providers selling music to cell phones.
What's bugging me is that it does seem to work, I just don't get why, some phones don't even have a normal headphone connector, thus no connection to a real speaker. But still the music gets bought, just to be listened to through loudspeakers designed to reproduce no bass at all, I pity them.
If people are stupid enough to pay that much for a polyphonic midi of a song then they might have a niche business.
Globally, the revenue of mobile phone ringtone sales dwarfs that of music downloads by around 15:1. That is, the total revenue of *all* music downloads combined (iTMS, Napster, Rhapsody, etc) accounts for less than 10% of the total revenue sales that mobile carriers are raking in from ringtones.
Remember, whereas Apple's sales of iPods are reckoned in single-digit millions per quarter, mobile phone sales are reckoned in hundred of millions per quarter. That's a lot of people buying "one or two" ringtones per phone.
Da Blog
That pretty much ensures that all best music is there!
No wonder they're charging $2.50. If they only dealt with labels then this shows what the labels are going to push Apple for next year.
The situation is getting riper and riper for musicians to tell these folks to go jump and take the primary seat in dealing with digital distrubutors. Sooner or later it will happen.
If labels had any sense they would be charging nickels and dimes for very lightly DRM'd downloads to hold that market.
Cell phones always seemed like an interim market until widespread highspeed network access becomes affordable. Who cares about another service to try and hook you into a lame portable network access subscription .. what i really want is free wimax access, then IP phones become commodity and then we can really talk about features.
Many of you have an American-centric point of view, where iTunes rules. But, in Asia, cellphone rules! In Indonesia alone, there era 30 million cellphone usuers. Compare that to around 8 million Internet users. 30 million is a large number. How be is the population in your city? I could imagine that the market in China and India would be much BIGGER! Although, US$2.50 is a bit too much. My informal polling (in one of my blogs) showed that people are willing to pay US 10c for a song. That's their willingness to pay (WTP). I'd say, price it at 10c, or even less (price it like SMS), and youngsters will download without thinking. So, yes there is (are?) a market for it. In fact, I am excited. I've been thinking about this service for about 6 months. Now, I am starting to write the requirement (equipments, software, billing system, all the work). We are thinking of offering the service in a small mall first (create our own small cell). Any hints?