A BusinessWeek article about rap group Public Enemy was in my RSS reader this morning, its description saying “The hip-hop group sees wireless music as a way to air its radical views — and make a little money”. The group’s Chuck D has been involved in digital music for a long time, through the Rapstation site and other efforts, so I thought Public Enemy might be up to something interesting.
If they are, they didn’t share it with BusinessWeek. Apparently they’ve got an album that’s been out for a while, and this week — get this — they’ll sell ringtones from it. Even taking into account BusinessWeek’s generalist focus, passing this off as innovation in mobile music is a bit over the top.
Part of the reason that mobile music has failed to take off quickly has been that people with vested interests blur the definition of what it is. Ringtones may be musical, and they may be played on a mobile device, but ringtones aren’t mobile music. And mobile music isn’t ringtones. It’s more than a question of semantics, it’s an issue of purpose. Music is entertainment; ringtones are expression. Kids don’t buy ringtones just because they like they way they sound, they buy them because of what they say — messages like “look, I’m cool, I’ve got this ringtone like the other kids”, or “look, I’m cool, I’ve got this unique ringtone”.
Blurring the two causes problems: take, for instance, Sprint’s recently launched music store, which delivers full tracks to phones for $2.50 each. Some people justify the price by saying people will pay a premium for being able to download songs anytime, anywhere, then finish it off by saying, well, if they pay $2.50 or more for a 30-second ringtone, $2.50 for a full track is a bargain. It’s hardly a bargain with the standard going rate for PC downloads at 99 cents per song, and $2.50 per track makes $18 CDs look cheap.
But it’s not a bargain when you consider the premium price of a ringtone over a PC download is for the personalization aspect — in essence, it’s more valuable to many people to project an image about themselves than to entertain themselves with a song. Treating mobile music in the same regard as ringtones won’t work, nor will basing the price of one on the other. They’re both musical, yes, but thinking of them as similar media with similar uses and similar goals will result in failure.
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
Very good insight Carlo (again) on this mobile music topic. I agree that the moment users figure out (and they will soon) they can acces/buy/share mp3 tunes from different sources through different technologies (3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi) at different pricings, they will make their choices out of what’s available, now this space is monopolised by the operators (and locked by their DRM solution) but this is going to change with the convergence of networks and my guess is once we’re there, the users are not gonna choose the high pricing as we know now from cut-up songs marketed as mp3 clip ringtones… If the business keeps going like this, we all might end-up bying more CD’s (again) and copy them to our different home devices for our relatives and friends (as we used to do), it might be cheaper in the end… but that could not have been the idea, not?