Music on the move: music on a mobile phone

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 1 Sep 2005 at 14:42

With the widely anticipated launch of the Motorola iTunes phone next week, the arrival of the Nokia N91 'Jukebox' and Sony 'Walkman' W800 phones, and the launch of HMV Digital with support for phone downloads, attention is focussing on the role of the mobile as a music device. But along with obvious advantages - such as their portability, usability and growing memory capacities - there are potential drawbacks - battery life, sound quality and integration (or otherwise, with music download services.

We've been tracking this area and can reveal the results of our Music on the Move survey, which considered issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) and the current popularity for music on mobiles.

In the second of a two part series on digital music on the move, we consider the possibilities for using your mobile phone as a music centre. We find out how many of you use your phone to listen to music, the models involved, and what are the perceived advantages and disadvantages...

And thank you to all the respondents who took the time to take part in the survey - all 1,085 (you can read the first article here: Music on the move: music downloads and DRM).

Music at your service

The first question we asked was: Does your current mobile phone support listening to music? Thirty per cent of respondents had phones capable of playing music tracks, as against 56 per cent who didn't, with eight per cent saying they didn't know (six per cent, remarkably, did not own a mobile phone).

But having the functionality is one thing, taking advantage of it is another. When asked how often they listen, only 13 per cent of respondents listened 'sometimes', with a minimal four per cent listening 'very often'.

When it comes to the make of phone, Nokia clearly leads the way, ahead of Sony Ericsson, with Motorola and Samsung further behind. Specifically, the Nokia 6230 was by far the most popular for mobile phone music listeners. The only phones to come close were the Samsung D500 and the Sony Ericsson K700I, followed in turn by the Orange SPV C550 and Sony Ericsson K750I.

Size of the market

With the mobile music market expected by Jupiter Research to ring up $9.3 billion worth of revenues by 2009, the nascent 'full track' download market, which was worth just $20 million in 2004, is also projected to become a $1.8 billion business by 2009. But how ready is the market, and what are the perceptions of the potential consumers?

We asked: Whether or not you currently listen to music on your mobile phone, please choose what you think is the most important benefit of downloading music to a mobile phone?

The most attractive proposition for a phone-based music player is that you only have one device to carry around (53 per cent of respondents). Arguably this was a major factor in smartphones seeing off PDAs and, potentially, separate MP3 players could face the same threat to their status as the primary portable device.

Four per cent welcomed the prospect of integrated charging to their phone bills. This is an easily over-looked advantage, especially for service providers. Arguably this has already been a factor in the success of Orange's music service, Orange World.

Downloads cost £1.50 a track - more than downloading from online stores using a PC - but this doesn't appear to have put people off (a spokesperson for Orange said that March saw Orange World doing 50,000 downloads, and rising, with around a million unique users on the music section of Orange World a month).