Friday, April 07, 2006

JupiterResearch: Crazy Market Forecast for Mobile Music

Thomas Husson at JupiterResearch complains about research firms that make outrageous market forecasts after reading a "press release from an established company quoting a research company forecasting that the worlwide market for full track music downloads to mobile devices will reach USD 9.3 billion by 2011." Husson writes:

Well. Well. Well. The current market for music (including physical sales, CDs and so on) in Europe is usually estimated around 9 billion euros by several reliable and trusted players. So I wonder how this company would assess the whole market in 5 years time, if you include other emerging digital formats such as Internet paid downloads, fixed and mobile streaming, podcats, ringtones, realtones, video tones and ring back tones.... EMI expected once that 25% of their revenues would derive from digital sales by 2010. This research firm may have read it the other way round...
He concludes that "this is why I get furious when I see really poor forecasts in the public domain, because it undermines the credibility of all market forecasts."

Will that other firm still be around in 2011 to see if their prediction came anywhere close???