Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
Mobile music to explode, provided flatrate
Informa estimates it to generate $13B in revenue by 2011.
Quote: Moreover, Informa predicts that the inevitable move towards flat-rate monthly packet charges will result in the imminent emergence of larger files of up to at least 200Kb.
True (yet operators still don't provide this), but we are not talking 200 kbytes, rather 2 Mbytes per file. When users have real flatrate data the dam will burst. Downloading times is not a major issue, unless the battery runs out of juice much quicker this way.
Surely networks will be faster until 2011 as well, lessening the issue of downloading multi-Mbyte files.
Even more than on PC-accessed music services I believe single song sales will completely dominate, due to downloading times, but also simply because that's the general trend anyway, and because at many times the song will be used as a ringtone, which will also affect how music is being made (more focus on releasing singles ahead of complete albums etc).
I expect monophonic and polyphonic ringtones (MIDI or other formats) to have all but vanished by 2011.
As I prefer theme-based elaborate classical or progressive rock albums in at least CD quality (compressed to a non-lossy format like FLAC) this is probably not for me anytime soon. I don't think music download services will care about "my" demographic as most customers will be happy with the latest heavily compressed single songs.
AllOfMP3 is as all knows completely illegal, at least based on non-Russian law (they buy one CD, rip it, and sell it in any number of copies; doesn't sound very legal to me), but one thing they've done completely right is to let the customer decide what format and quality to download. The larger the file the higher the price. Providing this flexibility for mobile phones probably doesn't make sense, but I hope music services will provide this for broadband or hot spot download.
To support FLAC and similar you need a lot of memory, but as Flash-based players and phones now have 4 Gbytes, it's feasible provided you can use a PC as main storage for all your media. My iAudio X5 supports FLAC, but it also has a 20 Gbyte hard drive, so it can store several albums in this format.
Mobile music market to reach US$13 billion by 2011, says research firm
Quote: Moreover, Informa predicts that the inevitable move towards flat-rate monthly packet charges will result in the imminent emergence of larger files of up to at least 200Kb.
True (yet operators still don't provide this), but we are not talking 200 kbytes, rather 2 Mbytes per file. When users have real flatrate data the dam will burst. Downloading times is not a major issue, unless the battery runs out of juice much quicker this way.
Surely networks will be faster until 2011 as well, lessening the issue of downloading multi-Mbyte files.
Even more than on PC-accessed music services I believe single song sales will completely dominate, due to downloading times, but also simply because that's the general trend anyway, and because at many times the song will be used as a ringtone, which will also affect how music is being made (more focus on releasing singles ahead of complete albums etc).
I expect monophonic and polyphonic ringtones (MIDI or other formats) to have all but vanished by 2011.
As I prefer theme-based elaborate classical or progressive rock albums in at least CD quality (compressed to a non-lossy format like FLAC) this is probably not for me anytime soon. I don't think music download services will care about "my" demographic as most customers will be happy with the latest heavily compressed single songs.
AllOfMP3 is as all knows completely illegal, at least based on non-Russian law (they buy one CD, rip it, and sell it in any number of copies; doesn't sound very legal to me), but one thing they've done completely right is to let the customer decide what format and quality to download. The larger the file the higher the price. Providing this flexibility for mobile phones probably doesn't make sense, but I hope music services will provide this for broadband or hot spot download.
To support FLAC and similar you need a lot of memory, but as Flash-based players and phones now have 4 Gbytes, it's feasible provided you can use a PC as main storage for all your media. My iAudio X5 supports FLAC, but it also has a 20 Gbyte hard drive, so it can store several albums in this format.
Mobile music market to reach US$13 billion by 2011, says research firm
