Commentary

Study: Adults Don't Care About Mobile Music

A new survey conducted by Jupiter Research shows that fully two thirds of American adults have absolutely no interest in listening to music on their mobile phones. Some of the biggest roadblocks? Songs cost too much, and it's just too difficult to find them via mobile phone. I agree, in part. Do you?

A new survey conducted by Jupiter Research shows that fully two thirds of American adults have absolutely no interest in listening to music on their mobile phones. Some of the biggest roadblocks? Songs cost too much, and it's just too difficult to find them via mobile phone. I agree, in part. Do you?The study looks at over-the-air download services more than anything else, and concludes that most adults find the process to be too annoying to bother with. I can't argue with that point. I've tested all the major music download services and none of them is all that easy.

Unless you know exactly what you want and perform a targeted search, browsing mobile music libraries is painful at best. You have to wade through menu after menu, screen re-load after screen re-load to see even a handful of songs, artists, or albums displayed at a time. As much as I want this business model to succeed, it's simply not enjoyable.


More Mobility Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

Only a couple of music stores get it right: the iTunes Music Store (which is available only to the iPhone); the Nokia Music Store (which is only available in select European countries); and the new, upcoming Sprint music store that I saw demonstrated on the Instinct handset last week at CTIA. Groove Mobile completely reworked its software to work well with that device, and the results look promising. Why do these three work? Because discovery is easy, prices are standard, and you get a copy for your phone and your PC.

As for the rest of the mobile music services, here are some glum numbers to contemplate:

  • Only 5% of U.S. mobile subscribers sideload tunes from their computer
  • Only 2% download tracks over the air
  • Only 14% of users are even remotely interested in over-the-air downloads

The top complaints are price, discovery, user interface issues, digital rights management, and device redundancy.

Personally, I listen to music on a wide range of devices, typically whichever form factor is most appropriate to whatever I am doing. That often includes my phone. I've only downloaded one album from the iTunes Music Store to my phone. Not because I don't think the store stinks, but because I am archaic and still actually purchase real CDs.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links