Music Consumerism Goes Mobile

A report published this week by eMarketer has stated that going on current statistics, online and mobile sales will overtake offline and stationary music sales in just three years time.

Few industry forecasts show rainbows and skipping in the future of the traditional music outlet, but few have suggested that the overtake could come this soon before.

The mobile music (master recording ring tones, full-track audio downloads, ringback tones, music video downloads, and streaming services) sector accounted for $1.7 billion last year whereas online sales knocked up $1.9 billions worth of transactions. Come 2011 and the figures are projected to be $7.3 billion and $7.5 billion for mobile and online respectively.

The entire industry's income is expected to drop from $31.8 billion to $26.2 billion over the same time-scale.

Record labels are expected to spend considerable amounts of their time and financial resources securing partnerships with distribution platforms within the communications industry over the next few years. Particular of interest to the labels is the recent Nokia "Comes With Music" strategy, wherein record labels are paid a fee in return for the phone's user being able to download music released by that label - litigation free - onto the phone.