Fiesty Mobile Music Startups

It seems that no sooner than our industry starts making money on one service that it starts hyping the heck out of the next batch. So it is, we're finding here in New Orleans, with mobile music.

Vodafone recently announced big results and intentions to expand its 3G-based music download service, which is powered by Musiwave. My post Monday "Music Downloads vs. Ringtones" addressed the need to take a time-based approach to understanding market evolution as new content types achieve adoption and integration into what came before.

Unsurprisingly, some of the music startups take indirect aim at the established ringtones business in order to fund early adoption of their platforms for distribution of the new new thing. Apparently, just doing the volume business better doesn't make for an effective enough sales pitch. And so it is that we hear spurious claims that on the back of a music download service we'll refactor the entire user experience, and oh yeah, bring the old content types along for the ride.

As a provider who appreciates all the challenges remaining to increase penetration of the old, suffice to say we find this position presumptuous. Isn't it yet more likely that the entrenched old guard (some irony here) will stretch into the new, and assimilate it along the way? I'd argue that's why Musiwave has been so successful out of the gate: They're a bona fide ringtone provider, selling ringtones and growing up into full track downloads.

Presentation Technologies

It's astounding to observe all the industry noise about customizable phone software that's risen to a crescendo since we launched Openwave Phone Suite V7 at 3GSM in 2003. Among the many purveyors, recently I've been impressed with Macromedia's progress. Even six months ago it was hard to imagine Flash's current arc of succeess, but recent trends and wins indicate Flash is for real and probably leads the pack in viability.

Their current lineup of demos crisply illustrates the story of how Flash has progressed from animated entertainment to become the basis for a device user experience and yet beyond that to facilitate "content solutions."

In the past six months Macromedia has inked significant deals with Samsung and Nokia building out of their commercial projects with DoCoMo and KDDI in Japan. It looks and feels a lot like how Openwave built its browser franchise years ago, taking the world's first color mobile browser to Sprint and Vodafone after deploying it to KDDI.

With the wireless industry's march to ARM9 processors that began in 2004, the mobile user experience for hundreds of millions of phones in 2006-07 won't be gated so much by technology as by channel and delivey dynamics. Sure, the UI demos from Macromedia and others really are cool--with new effects and obviously improved design values. The consumer certainly will see the difference on their 160x120 VGA screen, and brands will appreciate the new opportunities to express themselves.

The reality of our market however is one of great impedence between consumer demand and delivery. This is the real reason my smart money's on Macromedia first and embedded browser vendors second. The former brings at long last a legitimate and relevant design authoring toolset & community to mobile, while the latter offers the porting and delivery channel into mass market handsets. Those are the real keys to sucess here.

OMA's drive to standardize ECMAScript Mobile Profile lags Flash's proprietary application to phones by at least a year, but there will be room for both technologies. Like Flash, ESMP can "mobilize" a large developer community and avail itself of existing toolsets. If the tools lag compared to those Macromedia can drive itself, at least mobile browsers have built channels that are already established. Those channels are ready to move product behind early adopters Sprint and Vodafone, whose phone specs are already calling for ESMP in some phones for 2005.

Our meetings with Macromedia and ACCESS today really underscored how much momentum those companies have built for technologies that will soon provide much higher fidelity, more mobile device-appropriate user experiences. Look for Flash and ESMP to have a huge impact starting 2006 and beyond!

[Posted from my Treo 600 with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

The Long Tail & The Little Guy

Wired's article The Long Tail has attracted a lot of attention at Motricity. We're interested in its assertion that in digital content, the pareto principle goes out the window because shelf space is no longer scarce. That is, the bottom 80 percent of content titles by unit volume constitute more than half of overall revenues because there are just so many titles and so much specialization.

The article addresses PC music downloads. Does the long tail apply to mobile? Certainly not today: fragmentation, device usability, limited screen real estate network latency and other factors conspire to restrict mobile shelf space.

So, as one audience member texted to one panel today, what about small content providers? How do they get distribution? Operators can't deal with so many, so how do they get to market? If the little guy is important to either the long tail or discovering the next hit, how exactly does that come about given today's mobile distribution realities?

Tmobile described its approach, which is a content gateway program in which the small guy keeps majority of revenue. Distribution visibility (awareness) comes from marketing outside the storefront such as Jamster does via short code adverts on TV. In Europe,of course, this is the rule not the exception, but we're now seeing greater success with this distribution vector even in the us.

The way forward has both supply-side and demand/access necessities. In supply, we need technical and business approaches that make niche content profitable, ie. possible at lower fixed/upfront cost. For access, we need approaches that let marketers market and end users act on the calls to action that appeal to them. This means short codes in the short term, yes, but longer term it means increasing reliance upon analytics and facilitating commerce in physical and digital contexts beyond the wap storefront. The market should be driven by what users actually do, not what the industry thinks they will or are doing.

[Posted from my Treo 600 with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

Music Downloads vs. Ringtones

I started off the day unfortunately missing Mitch Lasky's keynote on the future of mobile gaming, but catching most of a panel on "What's Hot" in mobile content. One debate centered on whether mobile music downlods is ready for primetime. Motorola cites research that 73 percent of consumers are interested in having music tracks on their device. But the panel's consensus was that mobile music won't happen at scale till 2006 because the infrastructure won't be ready.

This kind of debate about market timing is pretty typical for our industry. All the infrastructure *is* in place for selling ringtones, which is exactly why "boredom" can coexist with, as one operator put it, so very much more economic opportunity to broaden demographic penetration.

More "exciting" time-to-market technologies (here, mobile music downloads) potentially refactor the way existing markets (ringtone downloads) function because the TAM won't support the overhead of supply chain and operational support integration. Regardless of whether the technical and business hurdles demand it in steady state, refactoring sometimes seems the only way forward for purveyors of the new new thing. But there's only so far (so many accounts in time) refactoring can go, precisely because the effort is so intensive by its nature.

It is true that so much of the market isn't yet penetrated by even basic ringtones. As several panelists indicated, we should focus on getting a broader market of people comfortable with that first and focus on the technologies that will drive the micro-segmentation and easy discovery that promise to bring the Long Tail effect to ringtones.

The resolution of the music vs. ringtones debate really lies just in realizing how the consumer value propositon differs and how the timing of market evolution plays its role. Groove (formerly Chaoticom) CEO Bathseba Malsheen pointed out to me that early data show that one in ten subscribers buying a ringtone also buy the full track. The ringtones we buy are novelties while the full track is consumed and therefore portends higher involvement as real entertainment per se. In short, ringtones is personalization while music is just personal. Both markets are big and worthwhile for mobile. There's some significant overlap & opportunity between the two. But they're different markets at very different stages of evolution and requiring different value drivers to take their next steps.

At Motricity, we're getting prepared by partnering for the new and redoubling our focus on the now. For us and our operators, it's key that when music reaches where ringtones are today, each market has taken it's next step in a way that leverages what we've learning in the other.

[Posted from my Treo 600 with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]

First Post - Purpose of My New Blog

For awhile now I've been meaning to start a blog on my area of professional interest and expertise, which is the evolving mobile content technology business. From my vantage points now as VP Product Management at Motricity and previously as head of product management for Openwave's phone software product group, I've developed a unique perspective on this technology business--and now it's exploding.

Motricity employees can check out my post to our internal Wiki on the market for mobile content client software. At some point I'll post a public version of that document as a conceptual framework to some of what I'll publish here.

My first series of posts will be published from this week's CTIA Wireless 2005 event in New Orleans. I've downloaded HBlogger for my Treo 600 to try out mobile blogging.

This is a test post from my Treo as I get ready for my trip.

[Posted with hblogger 2.0 http://www.normsoft.com/hblogger/]