Digital Media Buzz > Mobile Music Experience Stunted

Mobile Music Experience Stunted

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By Moria Byrne

If the world is in the middle of a mobile phone industry boom, America is the financial late bloomer. A Forrester Report estimated that only 60 percent of Americans who responded to a survey weren’t interested in loading music to their cell phones. Americans find it more convenient and cheaper to load music to their MP3 player or their iPod.

There are many cell phone carriers that promote their phones as MP3 compatible but the process isn’t any different than using a portable digital music player. The user still has to download the application to the PC before buying and loading the music. The music is then transferred to the cell phone. Only difference is that the user now pays a data fee to the cell phone company to save music on their phone and memory card and the digital music service to purchase the music.

Free service is popular for obvious reasons. Users can save money by downloading free music onto their computer and then transferring the music onto their cell phones. Unfortunately, only certain service networks carry free music services, Pandora and Slacker being the most popular. They would prefer that you use their music service or a music service partner. AT&T, Vodaphone, VerizonWireless, Nokia, and T-Mobile all offer their own music on the go services. Users must pay a monthly fee for these services on top of your data plan fee. AT&T has an exclusive agreement with iPhone.

Pandora provides free digital streaming music to users. On average, there are more than 30,000 iPhone users on Pandora daily. User functions include a search engine (artists, videos, songs, albums and lyrics), list of favorite songs and preferred stations. Fifty percent of Slacker Radio users are mobile phone listeners. Slacker gives users an incentive to switch to mobile listening: members who opt for both a digital and PC plan at renewal time receive a Blackberry Curve.

“We’re trying to find the intersection of a phone a million people will want to buy and a carrier that will use free service,” says Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora.

There are other reasons users are reluctant to switch from an MP3 portable player to mobile phone music —bandwidth. Limited bandwidth is causing uproar among MP3-compatible users. By downloading music to their cell phones, users take up memory space on their cell phone. Also, users may want to download music from a free site and save it on their service provider’s playlist.

Music service providers are claiming that a great deal has changed in the past 12 to 18 months. Before cell phone users had to download music on a case-by-case basis. They had limited choices in bandwidth and handsets. Now, smart phones provider customers with a larger user interface. Yet, not all MP3 players are equal even in the realm of the broader user interface. The appearance of smart phones hasn’t helped users with MP3-compatible cell phones. Typical non-smart phone MP3 users have a memory of up to 120 MB whereas smart phone users have up to 3GB. MP3-compatible users are finding that downloading digital music is eating up their bandwidth. They need an additional memory card to download music. That is if their carrier allows the music service application. Otherwise, users have to download music onto their PC first and then transfer the music to their cell phones.

“You get a stale user experience (by using multiple platforms) and it’s somewhat challenging. You’re always in search-and-retrieve mode,” says Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of Slacker.

Yet, most music service companies aren’t focused on getting networks to troubleshoot MP3-compatible problems. Instead, they are interested in expanding the market of available smart phones to bring down the price and increase the number of smart phone users. “We’re headed toward small phone markets and networks that are robust,” Westergren says.

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