We’ll all too aware that record companies have been blaming their industry woes on people who download music without paying for it. They’re also very fond of making the flawed assumption that every track downloaded for free would have been paid for if the free option didn’t exist – despite no evidence to support the [...]
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Nearly A Fifth Of American Adults Say They Play Music On Their Handsets
eMarketer (always a nice source of data and charts) put up a recap (via Orbitcast) of some recent Pew data about how adults in the US use their mobiles. The stats seem a little inflated across the board, but the survey claims 19 percent of adult mobile owners use the internet on their devices — [...]
Is Mobile Music — Finally — About To Take Off?
I’ve been watching the mobile music market pretty closely for some time, even going so far as to start a news and links blog about it a few years ago. I gave up after a while, though, because it seemed like the industry was constantly stuck in neutral, never really making any progress, thanks to [...]
Nokia’s N-Series, Now With Free Music
I’m here at Nokia World in Amsterdam this week, listening to the company talk about its vision of the future and its current strategy. You can follow along with my photos on Flickr, and I’ll put some videos on YouTube as well. You can also watch some of the talks online at Nokia’s site. The [...]
Social.FM – Radio Done Right, and Gone Mobile
Several weeks ago, I met with Social.FM, formerly known as Mercora. Mercora is well-known for its web offering, a social music jukebox service, which creates a streaming audio channel personalized to a user’s taste in music. It’s also created a mobile version, first for Windows Mobile devices, but more recently for Symbian smartphones as well. [...]
Vodafone Tries To Answer the iPhone With “Free” Music, Sort Of
Vodafone UK has been pushing mobile music hard as it builds up its holiday sales efforts, with its handset lineup offering a lot of music-centric devices, while it also announced its MusicStation service. MusicStation, powered by Omnifone, embodies the much-talked-about “jukebox in the sky” concept. For 2 pounds a week, Vodafone customers have unlimited access [...]
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Universal’s Free, Ad-Supported Music Downloads Have Quite The Hill To Climb
Universal Music has announced it will work with a startup called SpiralFrog to make its catalog available for free, via an ad-supported service. This is the kind of radical change the recording industry’s business model needs, so kudos to Universal for being the first to try something different. That said, I’m pretty skeptical of this [...]
Well, That’s Certainly One Way To Do Mobile Music
Geriatric rockers The Rolling Stones have hopped on board the mobile music train — sort of. Through a service called Listen Live Now!, fans will be able to listen live to their concert today in Paris via their mobile phones. And when I say via their mobile phones, I don’t mean some sort of streaming [...]
Is This The Dawn Of DRM-Free Music From Major Labels?
Yahoo’s been getting a lot of attention this week because they’re selling a Jessica Simpson single for download. It’s not just any single, though, there’s hundreds of customized versions of the track, and users can download the one that’s got their name in it. But that’s not what’s generating all the interest — the big [...]
Who Needs A Ringtone To Tell Them A Call Has Ended?
On Friday, I mentioned how record labels are chronically unable to innovate, particularly when it comes to mobile music, beyond devising attempts to get people to pay for the same content over and over. Here some wonderful examples from a Reuters story on the music industry’s (misguided) high hopes for mobile: Within a matter of [...]
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