Bad news for mobile music

A SURVEY carried out by Entertainment Media Research - in association with the law firm Olswang - makes pretty dire reading for the mobile phone industry. By contrast, it gives a whacking great boost to the social networking sites.

When asked what do they do when they hear a track which they'd like to download to their mobile, only six per cent said they'd buy it from their network operator's portal. A massive 44 per cent said they simply weren't interested in downloading music to their mobile phones.

There's also bad news for technologies like Nokia's Visual Radio. When asked whether they'd purchase a track they'd just heard on the radio and download it to their handset, only 36 per cent found the concept appealing.

The only good news is that 52 per cent of those who said last year [2005] that they probably would download music to their mobile phones have done so. That equates to around 11 per cent of respondents actually downloading some music to their phones.

One of the main competitors could well be the DAB radio since 19 per cent of respondents might purchase a track if their radio had a 'buy now' option on it.

Significantly it seems that the social networks are heavily influencing consumers' taste in music. Myspace came top with 56 per cent of teenagers having visited it followed by Bebo, then MSN Spaces and Piczo (38 per cent).

Sperately Keith Jopling, a director with researcher, IFPI, said that growth in mobile music wouldn't really start to take off until 2008 when, among other factors , use of 3G became more widespread.

IFPI has found that only one in five consumers had used their 3G phone to download a music track or video. µ