eMarketer (always a nice source of data and charts) put up a recap (via Orbitcast) of some recent Pew data about how adults in the US use their mobiles. The stats seem a little inflated across the board, but the survey claims 19 percent of adult mobile owners use the internet on their devices [...]
I’ve been watching the mobile music market pretty closely for some time, even going so far as to start a news and links blog about it a few years ago. I gave up after a while, though, because it seemed like the industry was constantly stuck in neutral, never really making any progress, thanks to [...]
I’m here at Nokia World in Amsterdam this week, listening to the company talk about its vision of the future and its current strategy. You can follow along with my photos on Flickr, and I’ll put some videos on YouTube as well. You can also watch some of the talks online at Nokia’s site.
The [...]
Several weeks ago, I met with Social.FM, formerly known as Mercora. Mercora is well-known for its web offering, a social music jukebox service, which creates a streaming audio channel personalized to a user’s taste in music. It’s also created a mobile version, first for Windows Mobile devices, but more recently for Symbian smartphones as well. [...]
Vodafone UK has been pushing mobile music hard as it builds up its holiday sales efforts, with its handset lineup offering a lot of music-centric devices, while it also announced its MusicStation service. MusicStation, powered by Omnifone, embodies the much-talked-about “jukebox in the sky” concept. For 2 pounds a week, Vodafone customers have unlimited access [...]
Universal Music has announced it will work with a startup called SpiralFrog to make its catalog available for free, via an ad-supported service. This is the kind of radical change the recording industry’s business model needs, so kudos to Universal for being the first to try something different. That said, I’m pretty skeptical of this [...]
Geriatric rockers The Rolling Stones have hopped on board the mobile music train — sort of. Through a service called Listen Live Now!, fans will be able to listen live to their concert today in Paris via their mobile phones. And when I say via their mobile phones, I don’t mean some sort of streaming [...]
Yahoo’s been getting a lot of attention this week because they’re selling a Jessica Simpson single for download. It’s not just any single, though, there’s hundreds of customized versions of the track, and users can download the one that’s got their name in it. But that’s not what’s generating all the interest — the big [...]
On Friday, I mentioned how record labels are chronically unable to innovate, particularly when it comes to mobile music, beyond devising attempts to get people to pay for the same content over and over. Here some wonderful examples from a Reuters story on the music industry’s (misguided) high hopes for mobile:
Within a matter of weeks, [...]
Warner Music made some headlines this week with the news that it was taking its Korean unit and setting it up in a joint venture with SK Telecom and a record label the operator owns. Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman has talked about how “advanced and progressive” the Korean mobile music market is, and that the [...]