Mobile Music - Fresh news from the MIDEM

Thomas Husson | January 23, 2006, 06:00 AM

As expected, SFR confirmed to be the first country where the Vodafone Radio DJ offer is made available. The service will cost 9,99 euros for a monthly subscription or 1,99 euros / day (great to discover the service or to attract the prepay market segment). SFR also confirmed a few figures:

- 340K full-track music downloads for December only and 840K for 2005. According to Gfk, 20M paid songs were downloaded on the Internet. The ratio mobile / Internet is thus more than encouraging for a nascent market. No doubt mobile music stores will compete with the I-tunes, Fnac, VirginMega and HMVs of this world. SK Telecom, Korea's largest operator, claims to be the number one music store in Korea with 500k active users and 2M subscribers.
- 360k music video clips were downloaded for the full year
- 390k connexions were made to Music TV channels

More interestingly, SFR announced the launch of a new music pass, allowing an unlimited access to 80.000 Universal Music songs for a monthly subscription of 14,99 euros.

My colleagues, David Card and Mark Mulligan, mentionned to me that Yahoo charges $5/month for an all you can listen to PC-tethered service in the US and that Napster charges nearly 15 euros for it's tethered service in the UK and 10 euros in Germany. So such a pricing may not be that disruptive. I do not know yet which DRM is used and if dual delivery (to PC) is available but I suspect it is... However, this is a first from a mobile operator in Europe, even though 3 Australia has recently launched a monthly subscription for only 3$ a month but it is not clear if the access is unlimited.

We are not used to "all you can listen" offerings here in Europe and this will definitively be a major news for mobile operators. I suspect much more to come with other labels. SFR now has an interesing range of music offerings from personalized radio streams to unlimited full-track downloads. Only one thing is missing yet : bundles between music and personalization items (ringtones, RBT, logos of the artists,...) but my take is that such offerings will flourish on the market later in 2006.

Another news was the agreement allowing Ericsson to enable European mobile operators to distribute ringtunes and full-track downloads from EMI's catalogue in Europe. I thought the M-use platform (the name of the managed hosted services package offered by Ericsson to carriers wishing to provide their subscribers with music-based content services) was already offering EMI's catalogue. So far, the solution is white-labelled but the global partnership with Napster should enable carriers to benefit from the Napster brand. So far, customers using the M-Use platfrom are based in the Nordic countries (TeliaSonera and Tele2) except Sunrise and Swisscom in Switzerland. It does not appear to have a huge success. Nokia / Loudeye partnership, announced more than a year ago at the 3 GSM, did not perform particularly well. Does Nokia need a music brand as well or do operators prefer to rely on mobile specialists such as Musiwave and to a lesser extent Melodeo or Groove Mobile ? Not easy to say in the long run, but Musiwave and Sony Net Services are performing very well.

An excellent overview of digital music trends is available from the IFPI. Click here to download the full 2006 digital music report. A must read.