Knockin On Heaven's Door

To Griffin, who describes Evolab as the provider of a celestial jukebox, wireless mobile audio will be more popular than the car radio.

However, we won't see any huge changes until we can stream 32k content, he says. That will be the turning point when mobile devices add personal stereo as a option.

There is no doubt in Griffin's mind that cell phones or personal communicators will become music delivery gizmos. We have too many gadgets as it is, too many chargers, and too many cables, he says. I think that we work to get more functionality out of the gadgets we have.

Nokia, Sanyo, and SonyEricsson, to name but a few, seem to think so. Indeed, it's difficult to think of a device that could play the role of personal stereo better than the cell phone. Many phones in Japan now some with a built-in camera, so they already have the necessary storage capacity.

Furthermore, battery life is not really a problem, as personal audio devices such like mp3 players use little power, and Bluetooth functionality can make uploading, downloading, and swapping data easy. Music players will, in time, just become another function, like a clock or calendar. Nokia has already integrated an FM radio in some of its models, and last year Sony had a range of memory stick phones on sale in Japan, as did Panasonic, Sanyo and other vendors. However, so far, cell phone/mp3 audio devices have been a failure in Japan largely due to the ridiculous digital rights management software. Sony software, for example, will only allow the user to transfer each track a given number of times before the license expires.

There is really no reason for digital rights management software to be so onerous or psychotic, says Ty Roberts, CTO of Gracenote, which runs on online CD information database. The music industry got lucky last time, and were able to charge people to change from the tape or LP to CD. But they are not going to get away with charging users more than once for a particular piece of music.

However, Roberts believes that there are plenty of workable solutions. For example, rather than buying the actually bits and bytes that make up the a artist's track, customers could buy the rights to play that track and download it as-needed from a service like Evolab or Gracenote. The CD database, for example, has technology that can analyze the sound wave patterns and recognize the piece of music.

Griffin says that what seems like shortsightedness on behalf of music industry, in reality, just owns up to the fact that we live in the age of Tarzan economics. The record companies will not let go of one vine, the one that pays their salary, until then next vine appears.

But the music industry sees wireless as that next vine, as EMI's Samit told the crowd at CTIA: "The music industry will save wireless, he said, and wireless will save the music industry."