Too Many Mouths To Feed

It seems sometimes like news is very streaky. The last few weeks brought lots of stuff on mobile TV. This week it seems to be music's turn, so bear with me. Following yesterday's post on dual-delivery systems carrying dual charges as well, comes a story on MocoNews highlighting the difficulty carriers are setting up for themselves in the mobile music download space. Long story short, the carriers want to get paid from downloads, too, making it nearly impossible to compete on price with wired download stores' $1 per song. There's just too many hands grabbing for too small a piece of pie.

Operators assume that people will pay more for mobile downloads because of "convenience", by which they mean you can download songs from anywhere. I seriously doubt that's a strong enough motivation for people to overcome the inconvenience of browsing through a download shop on a handset and pay more on top of it. Think about buying a ringtone through a carrier portal or something similar, then compare that to browsing the iTunes Music Store -- because that's how consumers will think. Why go through a difficult process and pay more, when for a short wait, you can find what you want more easily and pay less at home, then just transfer it to your phone?

Well, that's assuming that you're not caught in the middle of some DRM lock-in, of course, but I think you get my point.