April 22, 2006
With sales of wallpaper and ringtone beginning to go nowhere, the music industry is searching for new ways to attract customers for more mobile revenue and promotional opportunities.
On the surface it seems that the merging of mobile phones and blogs are a guarenteed hit. With the huge penetration of mobile phones into the populous and those newer phones including photo and video cameras, there seems to be no way it could miss. Those who support this comment that the empowerment to blog while you're going about your everyday activities adds a more "real-time element to the experience."
Still, there is no guarantee whatsoever that this will take off. The camera phone may be everywhere, but one the very best ones take very good pictures and the video phones are even more costly. The other problem is that mobile companies have been training their subscribers for years to look at their mobile phones as existing for the purpose of making voice calls. To turn around now and totally change that into a mobile computer message is going to be a big challenge for them.
Now the way the music industry is attempting to create this new revenue stream is to emulate the blogging and social networking trend that is permeating the Internet at this time, and trying to expand that to the wireless world.
Here are a couple of examples:
"At the CTIA Wireless 2006 industry conference in early April, MySpace rival FaceBook -- with about 10.5 million monthly unique visitors -- rolled out a mobile extension to its service with Cingular, Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Members initially will only be able to post text updates to their FaceBook profiles, with photos expected over time.
"Others are following their lead. Intercasting's Rabble mobile blog service now runs on Cingular and Verizon Wireless, which charge subscribers $3 per month to join. Los Angeles-based startup Juice Wireless launched its Juicecaster blog service at CTIA as well. Unlike online blogs now creating wireless extensions, Juicecaster was built from the ground up to integrate online and wireless posting and access.
"Buzznet has been doing the same for the past two years, and recently won a contract with concert promoter Goldenvoice to power the integrated online and mobile social networking site of the upcoming Coachella music festival in Indio, Calif."
The music industry, like a number of other industries is realizing that the sales of music in its traditional forms is not going to be enough to keep the industry going strong. The recent merger of major league baseball and Signatures Network show this.
