The Battle For Mobile Music

British telco BT will launch a mobile music service on Monday that will allow users to listen to 50 radio stations on their handsets as well as download tracks for "a small fee". The service, called Livetime, will start as a pilot with Virgin Mobile but is likely to be extended to other networks. "Other services will include music videos and live TV news and sports coverage, for which BT has already signed deals with Sky News and Sky Sports News". Naturally the article was pitched as a fight against Apple for a share of the downloadable music market...(via Ringtonia)
However, one British socialogist has some bad news for promoters of mobile music...Ringtonia has also linked to an article quoting Michael Bull, who claims his research has shown that iPods are popular precisely because they don't have the functions a phone does. "He's found that owners of Apple's popular digital music player love being able to shut out the world's distractions, hate their cellphones and would prefer not to talk to anyone...His subjects were primarily professional men and women in their late 20s to 40s...These are also the affluent, intelligent people that advertisers want, precisely the people who are hardest to get," he said. "Are advertisers then going to be left with less affluent, lower socio-economic groups who aren't worth as much in terms of advertising revenues?" Does this mean music on mobile phones is dead in the water? Of course not...it simply means that there are many people in this world, and they all want different things, so there is room in the market for a lot of players...
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