Verizon Wireless Faces the Music

Joseph Laszlo | April 19, 2006, 11:52 AM

During a recent dinner with Ted Turner, the topic of conversation turned to Verizon Wireless's ads for its music phones.

Well, ok. I was in Atlanta at Ted's Montana Grill with some colleagues, having a bison steak...but Ted really WAS in the house. Which was pretty cool.

Anyway, it's worth noting that while VZ's music phone ads have been hit or miss with me (I'm not the target audience...I don't bowl or play hockey, for example), recently there's been a major change of rhetoric, where now the ads say "there are THREE ways to get music on your Verizon phone...download over the air, get it from our portal, OR sync music you've already got from your PC."

Verizon's online store now makes this more explicit as well.

I'm so happy to hear this message I don't even know what to say. It's entirely the right thing for the mobile operators to be doing, informing people that music on phones isn't exclusively about forcing you to re-buy your favorite songs. And I think long term it gets Verizon more sales from their music store, as more consumers are likely to appreciate the flexible value proposition of buy OR bring your own, expanding the music phone audience, and therefore the audience who might over time be persuaded to buy a track or two.