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."

Comments

Now Hirings:

[muffinass]

Spellings and grammars checking-ers

iTMS is the Niche, Not Mobiles

[meehawl]

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. Now maybe a lot of people will buy "one or two" tunes per phone. Got doubts? Fire up your spreadsheet and run some numbers...

Also, Apple's revenues per iPod from iTGMS are scant - I think the figure is something around 20 tracks per iPod. So in terms of service revenue, iPods are not very profitable, whereas the *billions* of mobile phones deployed are veritable revenue engines.