Michael Nash, a senior vice president at Warner Music, says his company is already in discussions with its constituent labels about having studio producers create mobile mixes -- such as the abbreviated 90-second or two-minute versions of songs used by T-Mobile-type download services -- at the same time as the full versions of songs are created. This could help create a new market for music, in which people listen to PC-based and phone-based songs differently, he said.
"From our perspective, it is a much more desirable outcome to have the mobile channel and online channel be differentiated," Nash said.
Wireless companies such as T-Mobile like that idea too, since it keeps customers on their network, using airtime and conducting transactions online instead of just using commodity voice minutes.
Much then is up to the designers at the big cellphone makers, who serve the wireless service providers as much as they serve the end users. Those manufacturers, for the most part, say they will create whatever that broad market demands. For now, it's a mix.
Phones need more memory and perhaps even a hard drive to meet the 200-song capacity typical of the average MP3 player in Europe. From a handset maker's perspective, such bloat is frowned upon, given the long-standing focus on keeping phones small.
"One hundred songs is more do-able," said Adrienne Campbell, manager of marketing communications for NEC America, the US telecommunications arm of Japan's NEC. "But consumers want it in their handset, sure; so it's a must-have feature."
Meanwhile, Nokia and others are using removable flash memory cards that hold up to 256MB, or several hours of music, as storage. These have proved popular with a certain niche, the company says.
"For people that really want to carry around 5,000 songs, I don't know if cellphones will ever have enough memory, Nokia spokesman Steven Kanuff said. "For people who don't want to carry two devices around, this is a good alternative."
