Crave Talk: A format war of mobile music downloads?

By Nate Lanxon on 03 April 2008, 2:32pm

Legal digital music downloads are skyrocketing in popularity, and the market is getting competitive. The next hurdle is mobile downloads and, as we observed at the birth of legal downloads on computers, various competing models are appearing.

In fact, selling music to mobile handsets has already proved very different to selling music via a computer. On the desktop, it's all about a la carte downloads -- paid for track by track -- as opposed to unlimited subscriptions.

It's unclear whether these unlimited, all-you-can-eat deals will be the future for mobile handsets, despite numerous operators running with them already. Vodafone has an exclusive unlimited download partnership with OmniFone, whereas Nokia has its Comes With Music offering. It's even less clear whether they'd work within an ad-supported environment, such as 3 and Sony's music video service we reported on yesterday.

In contrast to these all-you-can-eat services, O2 and Napster recently teamed up to offer Napster's massive catalogue in its entirety for a la carte download, at 99p per track -- bringing the model consumers are already familiar with to mobile phones. But as with OmniFone's tie-in with Vodafone, the Napster deal is only available to O2 customers.

Evidently, network exclusivity is the only way companies such as Napster and OmniFone will get their product on the wireless networks, meaning every network could have their own model, each with their own download plans.

For the consumer, this could get confusing. And as we saw with Blu-ray and HD DVD, when products are confusing consumers tend to sit back and ignore them.

If every network is going to have its own provider of mobile downloads, they need to at least settle on one identical business model. Unlimited downloads that remain on handsets could be the main offering, with a la carte purchases that download to handset and PC being the secondary offering.

This would prevent confusion, increase consumer comfort with downloading on-the-go, and ultimately give the music industry a return it sorely needs right now.

Hopefully 2008 won't see the start of another format war, as there's really no space for it in the mobile market, and the record industry can't afford to keep pushing people towards pirating. Decisions need to be made and they need to be made now. -Nate Lanxon