CANNES, FRANCE (AFP) - This year is set to be the year when the mobile phone could become the all-in-one, must-have gadget for music fans, music chiefs say.
During 2006 the mobile phone will combine the ability to let them download the latest hits and videos, watch TV, take photos and listen to radio -- while making the odd call in between.
With over 1.5 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide today, this prospect was music to the ears of the top music industry execs who have come in their droves to this Riviera resort for the influential MIDEM music trade fair that opened Sunday.
The music industry is pinning its hopes on the exploding digital music market, and phones in particular, to help bolster its profits that are being hit by the huge physical and online music piracy that is still rife worldwide.
"Its a new world that could transform the music industry in the coming years," Ralph Simon, who heads up the Americas branch of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF), which represents the global enertainment industry, told a packed mobile music conference here.
Mobile phones are the worlds single biggest electronic consumer item, Simon said, adding that mobile music accounted for a big 40 percent of the 1.1 billion dollar revenues made from digital music last year.
Added to that is news that one in five of all mobile phone users how listen to music on their phones, according to a recent report published by the global record industry association, the IFPI.
From just being a simple handset for making telephone calls, cellphones are evolving quickly into a whole entertainment hub.
Consumers could soon be spoiled for choice. Sony Ericsson was the first out of the starting blocs in Autumn last year when it launched its Walkman series of music phones that finally offered cellphone users an option to the Apples smash hit iPod and the plethora of other portable MP3 music players that have transformed the music scene.
Other multimedia-camera mobiles with added music features are starting to come onto the market including some from Motorola.
But the big daddy of them all could be the new N-series of multimedia music phones recently launched by Nokia, the worlds largest handset maker.
Nokia's top music-playing model in the series, the sleek black N91, can hold up to 3,000 songs, which should cover even the most avid music fans favourite collection when it comes on the market in the next few months.
Nokia top multimedia exec Anssi Vanjoki describes the N91 as "a tiny computer into which weve dropped a phone."
The big difference between the Walkman phone and the new Nokia one is that "ours is a multimedia computer," Vanjoki told AFP in a interview.
The cellphone and music worlds are hoping these latest music phones will help drive the somewhat slow take up of the high-quality third generation (3G) phones, which make it faster to download entertainment content on to the phone. These are just starting to catch in European markets although they are already commonplace in the much more advanced Asian markets. In Japan, 70 percent of all the phones sold in the first nine months of 2005 were 3G ones.
3G phones and their ability to download music and video faster and offer better sound quality could be a shot in the arm to the music industry. Ringtones are by far the biggest money spinner for the music and phone business but phone users are starting to switch to paying more to buy and download master ringtones, which are true excerpts from the original sound recording.
Radio will also become a commonplace feature on cellphones, industry experts said.
But not all phone operators are in favour of the all-in-one device.
France Telecom senior exec Patricia Legrand said her group doesnt believe in forcing consumers to do everything on one device.
The operator, which owns international mobile operator Orange and Internet service provider Wanadoo, recently launched two new services.
One, MusiCast, is a personalised radio service that can be accessed via home computers as well as mobile phones, whilst Live Music allows users to transfer music from their PC to their home hi-fi.
One of the few features left to be added in cell phones is already appearing on the Japanese market, the wallet phone.
Some 10 million Japanese are already subscribers to mobiles that include an in-built credit card feature that allows the phone to become a wallet that can can be used for online purchases, Takeshi Natsuno of Japans NTT DoCoMo told MIDEM participants.
That's one phone that owners will certainly not want to leave behind at home
No comments:
Post a Comment