Mobile Music - Giving Vendors New Hope
Following its acrimonious divorce with the Internet (a la Napster), the music business, in search of a new love and cash cow, is flirting with wireless industry. Last month at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association’s annual knees-up in Las Vegas, the two new lovers stepped out together. If the marriage is fruitful, its first child will be musical ringtones, their second will be music clips for multimedia messaging and promotional purposes, and their third will be mp3 music files.

Indeed, it could be argued that all three children are on their way now. Ringtones have only recently arrived in the US, AT&T and others are using music for multimedia messaging, and every major phone and PDA manufacturer has licenses of the dominant mp3 software players from vendors including RealNetworks and Microsoft.

Of course, listening to music while on the move is not a new concept. It's been around since the transistor radio, and for years, Walkmans, radios and minidisk players have been enormously popular. But what is changing is that digital music (albeit primitive) can now be delivered over the cellular infrastructure and played or stored on cell-phone like devices. As Apple iPod and other mp3 player users will tell you, once you get used to listing to an artist one song at a time, it is very hard to go back to listening to an artist one CD at a time.