9 Of 10 In U.S. Don’t Listen To Music On Cell
9 out of 10 people in the U.S. never listen to music on their cell phones. That's the key finding in a new Forester Research study The Future Of Music On Cell Phones. In my opinion. the music and cellular industries have only themselves to blame.
- Until the iPhone and a few outside apps the music experience on the cell pretty much sucked.
- Carriers asked people to pay a premium price for mobile downloads and portability. Many still do.
To add insult to injury, the music service that consumers are most interested seems to be streaming via Pandora, Last.fm and the like; and those services eat up bandwidth without producing much revenue for the carriers.
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Always nice to have a hunch confirmed by actual data.
neither do I
I do almost all of my music and podcast listening via my phone. I have a Nokia E71 and previously used Sony Ericsson W890i which unfortunately went for a swim.
The E71 has very usable music playing software, and with the right extra accessories is a pleasure to use on a daily basis. I have a delivery style business were I am in and out of a van for 10 hour days. I am listening to music and podcasts (and sometimes raio) for pretty much that whole time so I am definitely using it to the hilt.
One of the biggest advantages for me in using my phone is that I only have one device to charge and carry. (well, two including the bluetooth headset I use) When I get a business call the music automatically pauses and then resumes when I hang up. Also, my MP3 player and music collection are ALWAYS with me at all times.
However I have not EVER, not even once, downloaded a song via the mobile network. All of the music on my phone(s) got there by sticking the removable 8Gb memory card into my laptop and dumping MP3s that I have either ripped from my CD collection, torrented or copied from friends.
I don’t use streaming services primarily because I want my music listening experience to be fully mobile and the data costs would be hideous. Even if the data were unmetered I still wouldn’t bother because streaming over 3G would still be dropping out a lot and would absolutely murder the battery.
Another reason I don’t use streaming is that I don’t like the idea that one day I will go to listen to a favourite song and it won’t be there anymore because of some licence dispute, or it wasn’t popular enough.
Or perhaps I am into a new, small local band whose demo I picked up at their gig and it might be a long time before their music shows up on a streaming service. (I have several of these atm that I really like)
So streaming is NEVER going to cover everything, either all the music I want to hear, or all the places I want to hear it. It’s great for music discovery, but not for long term, repeat listening. So I have to have MP3s anyway, in which case I might as well just use all MP3s because it gives me total control, minimum cost and maximum battery life.
I love my “phone as MP3 player”, in fact I will never buy another phone without first ensuring it is a topnotch music player.
When I first got a phone capable of playing mp3s, I loaded a few favorite albums on it and enjoyed it. For about 3 days. Then I went back to my iPod. No phone I have ever owned has had one tenth of the user interface of an iPod. The music is too many layers away from the surface, and difficult to navigate through if you have much. I’m sure wider adoption of the iPhone & PalmPre is changing that, but it’ll be a while…
Even with an iPhone, I would only consider buying music from a service like eMusic — DRM-free, repeat downloads allowed. I’ve seen enough problems with syncing, crashes, etc, to know that if you only get one chance to download something after paying for it, you should be doing it on your primary computer (and backing up regularly).