Jackie Danicki

Mobile expert/influencer Tomi Ahonen has chipped in on the debate I started here when I noted Tomi’s contention that Apple’s market share of the portable mp3 player market is less than 20 per cent. Tomi’s remarks and data do illustrate just how insular our views of how ‘people’ do things can be. Some highlights:

The first global survey of music consumption, that covered expressly both iPod usage and musicphone usage, by TNS at the end of 2005, reported that 10% of adults use iPods, but 19% use musicphones to consume music (worldwide). The only country where more consumed on iPods than musicphones was the USA. So even last year - when most of the existing population of musicphones were the very early and quite primitive musicphones by the manufacturers (including the much derided Motorola Rokr) - twice as many people did consume music on phones than on iPods.

…Incidentially, Apple itself, in April of 2006, in its first quarter results conference call, revealed selected best international markets by iPod market share. No surprise that USA was best at 75%. The six countries with the next best market share were Australia 58%, Japan 54%, Canada 45%, the UK 40%, Germany 21% and France 11%. All other countries were “much worse” than these, according to Apple.

…45% of all South Koreans download music directly to their mobile phones (source NIDA Nov 2005)…South Korea has a very good technical environment for this, as it is the world’s leading broadband penetration country (or actually neck-to-neck with Hong Kong) and also South Korea is by far the highest adoption of 3G phones, nearing 60% penetration. Japan is a distant second having just passed 50%. For contrast, the UK has 9% penetration of 3G phones. (source for penetration rates Informa).

…Today, out of all music sold in South Korea, 45% is sold directly to mobile phones (source Telecom Korea May 2006). For contrast, in America even today, iTunes does not even sell 10% of all music sold in the USA.

The other market to consider is Sweden, the most advanced mobile music market in Europe. Sweden has already one of the big mobile operators - Tele2 (Comvik) - offering full track MP3 songs of older hits for download at a cost of 8 euro cents per song! And the SMALLEST of the mobile operators, Tre/Hutchison, on its 3G service based music store, already sells more songs than iTunes in Sweden.

…Each of the four giant global music labels, EMI, Warner, Universal and Sony BMG - have had their senior management comment on iPod vs mobile phone. EACH have said that mass market music consumption will definitely belong to phones, not the iPod.

More here.

Filed under: Business, Colleagues, Friends, Music, Podcasts, Technology