A research firm says the mobile music market with be worth more than $9 billion by 2009. It expects ringtones to make up just over half of this, but it’s hard to think that ringtones will be a $4.8 billion business in 2009, given the proliferation of DIY ringtone tools and the increasing use of ringtones to drive single and album sales, not to mention the strategy of many ringtone vendors to put short-term revenue-grabbing ahead of building a long-term business.
The report puts the value of ringback tones at $2.7 billion per year worldwide, which seems generous for a feature that really doesn’t seem like much more than a fad. But it puts the market for full-track downloads at just $1.8 billion. Without venturing into these seriously uncharted waters and making a prediction of my own, I’ll venture that in light of the other two components of the $9 billion-plus estimate, this is low, if for no other reason than that the download worlds of mobile and PC should be very tightly integrated by 2009.
Already we’re seeing companies develop dual-delivery systems that send downloads to both a mobile device and a computer, and deals such as the one between Nokia and Microsoft to support both company’s favored formats and DRM on both handsets and in Windows. Download services that don’t offer dual-delivery will be at a disadvantage; services that hope to lock users’ purchases to either the PC or the mobile phone will fail.
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