Japan Mobile music downloads brought $278.5m in sales in 2005

Yaromir at Japan's Cellphone Edge points to the latest report from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ), which finds that "mobile downloads dominated Japan’s market of digital music distribution in 2005, claiming 258 millions or 96.4% of total music downloads. The Internet held the mere 3.5% of the market share, recording only 9.5 million downloads."

According to the report, "music downloads via Internet generated 1,850,620,000 yen ($15.9m) in terms of revenue, while mobile downloads accounted for 32,339,996,000 yen ($278.5m)."

As I remarked here in the past, Yaromir notes that "the data from RIAJ highlights the known trend that Japanese consumers prefer connecting to the Web from cellphones rather than using PCs." This is due to most Japanese use their handset as their primary device for Internet access and less households own PCs....

Graphic via Japan's Cellphone Edge