Creating A Mobile Music Ecosystem

I've still got some stuff from CTIA I haven't covered yet that will trickle out for a while. One such topic I've been meaning to write about was based on my meeting with some of Sony Ericsson's developer relations folks. One thing that struck me during the conversation was how they're trying to build an ecosystem for developers around mobile music, not just using it as a tool to sell phones. They've done something similar with 3D Java games -- making support for it standard across most of their line, then encouraging and supporting developers to use it.

To do the same thing with mobile music is a fairly novel approach and one that's unique as far as I can remember. Most manufacturers' support for mobile music thus far focuses on playing back sideloaded music, or more often, supporting a carrier's paid download service. But there's far more to mobile music than that, and getting developers on board to create some music-centric applications will give the mobile music market a boost overall, whether it's streaming radio, song recognition, or anything else.

Some other random bits and pieces from talking to Sony Ericsson:
- They're seeing non-gaming use of Java on the rise, particularly for productivity apps. It's trickle-down from smartphones, primarily as a lot of business users want smartphone-like capabilities in featurephones.
- On the company's Fun and Downloads site that has games and wallpapers and the like, they get far more visits to the WAP version than their web site, and the biggest increase in downloads in the first half of the year there was from China.