Mobile devices Toolkit

Story: Is Apple driving music to mobiles?

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The cell phone music player idea is nice, but the only way cell phone carriers can make any money off of selling music on line is if they sell songs for more than 99 cents, or if the music labels cut their prices (yeah right).

Do the math. The only reason Apple sells music is to sell iPods, not because they can actually make money selling music on-line, thanks to the music labels.

The fact of the matter is that people want to own their music and the standard has already been set at 99 cents by iTunes. Anything over 99 cents will break the model and hey, consumers will just go back to file-sharing. Not that they've felt compelled to leave it, just yet, or ever.

Ringtones are one thing, but buying a collection of music at $2.49 a pop is never going to take off. Maybe they can make some money off of the impulse buyer, for the latest tune, but it will never match the volume of the iTunes Music Store at that price.

The only way for cell phone carriers to make money is to sell more cell phones and services, not music. Maybe this is where the subscription model could succeed, but again it won't match iTunes in volume. The iPod and iTunes are more about music "collections", as in hey, I want to hold my entire collection of music "on the go" (20, 40, 60GBs), and that won't happen on cell phones until the end of the decade. Nor can a cell phone be as portable (stick of gum) and disposable as an iPod Shuffle; maybe in the next century.

Cell phones may well over take the iPod (aka 21st century Walkman), but by the time they can hold 40GB of music and all of the cell services are in place to do it, the decade will be over and Apple will have sold the projected 100+ million iPods (2008) - that's three years from now. By then the bum rush will be over and Apple will have moved on to the next killer device, which may have nothing to do with music. Nothing last forever.

What happened to the Sony Walkman? Tape player, CD Player, MP3 Player, and the next killer device is on the way. Sony is still here thriving and so too will Apple, becuase they got it while its hot.

Some companies set the standards, like Sony and Apple, and the rest just follow to eat the scraps of giants.

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