Apple and other MP3 branded players will have nothing to worry about for the immediate future in terms of short-term sales impact but they will lose the youth market and their brands will age along with their demographic. Just as Levi’s let their brand grow old and allowed competitors such as Diesel to enter the youth market, Apple will face a “youth void”.

As for Nokia’s claim, I believe it (for once). Granted phones don’t have the memory capacity of some of the MP3 players around but neither do most people necessarily need 20G of memory. When you’re 15-16 years old you probably only know a handful of bands and listen to them repeatedly, for which 1G on a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone is more than sufficient.

One comment says on the video said it all. When asked if he had an iPod one respondent simply pointed at his Sony Ericsson Walkman and said, “This is my iPod”.

Only PR bunnies believe that journos “just tak[e] them as read and jump straight to their conclusions”. The stories you see in print are the rare ones that make it through the cynical hierarchy of subs, copy tasters etc.

My Razr is a great handset. It also plays MP3s. It does so badly, in mono. I have yet to use my iPod as an address book but I cherish both for their core function.

As an aside, m:metrics reckons that the UK is powering ahead in the mobile-phone-as-music-player stakes with 3.0% of users using their phones to play music, ahead of Spain on 2.8% and leaving the US trailing at 0.7% of users. At most half of these users also download music to their phones. I am *far* more inclined to trust them on this than Nokia, because they don’t make music phones, they didn’t just spend $60m on a music portal and I have found their stats in the past to be very good (insofar as far as anyone can judge these things).

http://mmetrics.com/press/PressRelease.aspx?article=20060912-sept06benchmark

But just to be clear: nothing against you or your stand in the long run I think we’ll definitely see some convergance, I’m just against the invention or abuse of stats in press releases!

From what I see out there myself, the ipod seems dominant. I’m one of those “just cos people can, doesn’t mean they are” separistas for the moment, but prepared to change my mind on it. A friend who works in primary schools in London tells me using phones to play MP3s is widespread amongst kids, but then that’s probably not affecting ipod sales because those kids may not have the disposable income to get an ipod. Heh, maybe the phones are getting them hooked and persuading them to swear fealty to Mr Jobs…

I guess what I’d like to see is some independent evidence to this effect (neither Nokia nor Apple count as independent!). I’m surprised there hasn’t been any proper research into it yet; I mean, mobiles and music players are pretty visible in contemporary culture…

And something like this will mean we don’t all have to rely on statistically invalid anecdotal evidence Personally I’m a bit disturbed that the phones-replacing-ipods meme hasn’t become so obviously true after a couple of years of floating around…

But seriously, I don’t think we can accuse Nokia of lying about sales – that would be pretty naughty, so the main point I want to make, namely, that there are more converged devices that stand alone ones, is hard to argue with.

So what we’re talking about is people actually using their converged devices. I agree that the 2 out of 3 seems high. Having said that anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that a lot of users of phone MP3 and Podcast downloaders seem to be people without stand alone MP3 players. This would probably make the people in your office, and me for that matter, a very unrepresentative sample.

Anyway, time will tell. It would also be a little boring if I stuck to stating the bleeding obvious here, so taking a position on something (even if I’m wrong sometimes) is part of the fun.

Russell

Convergance will happen, but I don’t see it as a zero sum game with one winner for a good many years.

Can we see the original source of this Nokia claim – provided without a link it could have been plucked from any marketing mans spiel and you have to assume Nokia have a vested interest in claiming people use the MP3 playing abilities of their phones, so they’re hardly unbiassed…

I’m thinking MP3 ringtones, maybe? Bear in mind the phone will probably ship with some MP3 ringtones built in, so use of one isn’t even a clear indiciation of desire to download an MP3 ringtone, let alone a real song. I personally wouldn’t count use of a ringtone as proof of a mobile being a music player, so I’d need to see the data which led to this “2 out of 3″ claim before I believed it… as an example, my ex couldn’t tell you what an MP3 was but I know the (built-in) ringtone on her K700 is an MP3.

A quick straw poll of people in my office, an office in which we do mobile phone development and (almost) everyone has top end phones, suggests maybe 1 in 8 play music on their phone, but that’s hardly a statistically viable sample…

(and no, I’m not an iPod fan…)