After the successful launch of Apple’s iPhone AT&T is readying a new wireless service which would allow its customers to download music from eMusic on their mobile phones.
eMusic is a famous online retailer that sells songs from independent labels and has positioned itself as a niche vendor, where (yet) unknown artists get more chances of reaching the audience. It is also US’ second largest online music retailer, after Apple’s iTunes, having nearly 2.7 million tracks available in its library. All these songs will be available for download starting Tuesday, July 31, when AT&T’s music-over-the-air service debuts.
AT&T’s move is not very spectacular- Verizon and Sprint, the nation’s second and third largest carriers, are already offering similar services- but is important because of AT&T’s dominance on the market. Besides putting pressure on its competitors to lower prices, AT&T’s entrance on the wireless music market could also set a trend that other companies (in the US or abroad) might follow.
Some 80 per cent of all mobile phones sold today are capable of playing music, but people prefer to use their own separate MP3 players.
The biggest U.S. mobile service plans to charge $7.49 for five songs, almost five times eMusic's most expensive 33-cent rate for customers who subscribe to its desktop service. AT&T’s fee per song of $1.50 is below Verizon’s $1.99 but higher than Sprint’s, which is $0.99.
By comparison, iTunes (which recently announced that more than 3 billion songs have been downloaded from the site since 2001) charges $0.99 for every song, but the downloads are only possible for PCs and Macs (so no wireless download for iPods).
Bad news though: the craved gadget that has shaken the entire telecom industry, aka the iPhone, will not work with the new services, despite having an iPod incorporated in it. Handsets from Samsung or Nokia however will be compatible.
“We know that we have a lot of customers in the segment that eMusic is trying to reach,” said Mark Collins, vice president of consumer data services for AT&T’s wireless unit.
“We think there are customers that are ready for eMusic, but they haven’t heard of it yet,” said David Pakman, the company’s president and chief executive. “We’ve focused on making this easy to use.”
AT&T said eMusic would allow customers to preview selections before they commit to a purchase. As with rival services, users can download a copy of each song purchased to their computer at no extra charge.
MP3 players face an uncertain future as analysts predict music-enabled mobiles will outnumber standalone MP3 devices by five to one come 2012.
More than half of the one billion mobile handsets shipped globally are expected to have music-playing capabilities in 2007, analyst house Portio Research predicts. MP3-enabled handset sales are expected to be highest in northern and Western Europe with 95 per cent of mobiles predicted to be MP3-enabled by 2011 in the region, the company’s research reveals.
Warner Music’s boss Edgar Bronfman Jr. confirmed during this year’s 3GSM conference in Barcelona that the wireless-music market is likely to face an “explosive growth” in the future, with the money spent on downloading songs and ringtones forecast to jump to 32 billion USD by 2010, compared to an estimated $9 billion this year.
The increased consumption of digital music on mobile phones will boost the global music market, with worldwide revenues expected to rise from $32.1bn in 2006 to $38.8bn come 2011, according to Portio.
Until now, downloading music on mobile phones has proven to be quite difficult for regular users, who are still unable to transfer the downloaded tunes on other devices due to DRM protection systems.
