Beyond the tones
Getting the pricing right for music on mobile phones can be a headache. Vodafone charges about $2.75 for each song, and in Japan, carrier KDDI plans to launch a service this month that will offer wirelessly downloadable songs for between $2 and $3. That compares with the 99-cent price per song at Apple's iTunes and other PC-based download stores. In addition, the cost of downloaded tunes is easily comparable to the cost of buying a CD.
Labels are loath to price mobile phone songs at much less, though. And people have been paying $2 to $3 apiece for ring tones and ring tunes without considerable protest, in part because there is nothing to compare them with off the phone.
Network capacity is also an issue. According to Musiwave's Babinet, the new Vodafone service compresses music in the AACPlus format, which creates files far smaller than an equivalent-sounding MP3 file. On a true 3G network, this can start playing after about five seconds, or about 15 seconds on the slower broadband networks used by American companies offering mobile phone data services.
For the most part, European and Asian carriers are further ahead in moving to networks with true 3G capacity. US carriers are slowly upgrading their networks, and new projects, such as a Qualcomm-sponsored 3G content network geared to video and music, are also under way.
Digital rights management is another concern. Record labels hope to avoid the trading of mobile downloads between phones or over PC-based peer-to-peer networks.
An early version of a standard for managing digital rights was created by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) industry group, but a second, stronger version is now gaining some popularity. Some labels eager to dip their toes in the music download waters are turning to proprietary rights management software that isn't compatible with OMA standards.
"There are a tremendous number of digital rights management issues that remain," says Thomas Gewecke, senior vice-president of business development at Sony Music.
In the United States, some labels point to the lack of phones that can handle full music as the hold-up in the mobile phone market. Some appropriate devices from Motorola and other companies have come to market in recent months, but they remain rare, and often have little storage capacity.
Growing consumer awareness of music could make the feature as popular as cameras on mobile phones and could break the logjam soon, enabling the United States to move more quickly along Europe's path, some labels predict.
"I think this may well be a year when consumers demand what they're not getting," EMI Group spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer says.
