Push Pause On The Mobile Music Revolution

Carlo Longino of MobHappy and Techdirt fame writes a very nice analysis of the music music scene at Gizmodo. Longino writes that the launch of the Motorola Rokr is symptomatic of why mobile music will remain "a niche application for the time being." In a nutshell, "the carriers don’t care about helping you carry around one less device; they see music phones just as a way to create another revenue stream."

Mark Donovan at M:Metrics concurred, stating "The carriers don’t want to create a phone that’s a great music player that doesn’t drive some other form of revenue." Regarding the potential for OTA music downloads to the handset, Donovan added "In the United States, just about everybody with a mobile phone has an Internet-connected PC, and in many ways, that’s where their hub is, in the entertainment space, for things like a music collection. So somehow trying to turn the mobile phone into an island is not a strategy that’s going to work."

Maybe U.S. carriers and the record labels are hoping they can duplicate
Japan's mobile music success, where downloads to phones easily outdistance downloads to PCs. However, As my friend in Japan told me, a lot more people in Japan don't own a home PC than in the U.S. so the mobile handset ends up being their main method of communication. Its going to be a hard sell in the U.S. to migrate users to a more expensive OTA model, when the PC has firmly established itself as the main conduit for music...