The Sound of Mobile

By 2011, says e-Marketer, online and mobile will shoulder 56% of music spending worldwide - over three times the share reported for 2007. So, while the CD takes a scratching at the digital love-in, subscription services such as Vodafone Live and the 3 New Music Club indicate that the mobile industry is really making room for music. Quite clearly, the sales proposition of downloads on-the-move is just too nutritious to resist.

Of course, if mobile is buddying-up with online, it may also have to consider replicating the veritable throng of extra-curricular music content that the net now boasts. Indeed, you don’t have to look too far these days to find flickr-happy audiophiles opening up our musical horizons with more videos, audio, blogs and forum threads than you can shake a USB stick at.

Enter Vodafone + Madonna. This deliciously commercial mash-up offers genuine exclusives (pre-release tracks and live gig streams) to the network’s members and is certainly worth a holler as an incentive for music-lovers to gravitate to their mobile. However, it’s hard to accept it as a suitable case-study for music ‘beyond the call of duty’. It’s a candid example of music-lovers getting extra from an artist, yet, like the Radiohead free download, it is a unique situation anchored by the established success of an artist, and cannot be said to signify the arrival of a long-term channel supporting great content for all bands and artists.

This kind of ‘channel’ is a big ask – a bit like requesting that thriving online music communities like Pitchfork and Last.fm simply shift their things over to Casa Mobile – but the technical limits of mobile won’t be an excuse for a limited vision in the long term. The online domain is creating different sorts of value for assets like music, and these will influence the mobile community as it unfurls. Pandora Media, for example, have just announced that their online service (an intuitive online playlist currently available only in the US) is going to be offered for free in mobile form on the iPhone 3G. There may be plans to expand to other handsets, but as yet this is the only announced mobile partnership. The power of this as a marriage of music and mobile is that it creates a discovery channel for the ‘on-the-move’ music-lover. It’s a radio station for the common sound addict - intuitively connecting you with new tracks based on your tastes, and feeding into consumer paths in turn. Sadly, users in the UK will have to migrate if they want to feel the benefits of Pandora mobile.

Blyk’s ever-evolving music content – a key attraction for members - is focused on connecting people and music intuitively. We strive to use our unique targeting capability as a way of linking 16-24s with artists on an interactive basis, and we look to the character of the music itself to help define the creativity of our communications. Music-lovers are ever-poised to inherit an extensive wealth of content from their favourite bands, and with Blyk’s multi-media platform we can begin to provide this content; previews, promotions, exclusives, competitions, dialogue, discovery – all possible in rich mobile media.

Of course, the full story of music and mobile will be amalgamated from all sorts of efforts and innovations, but here at Blyk we hope to play a compelling part. So watch this space - and we may yet see the hills alive with the sounds of mobile, and a true music experience for fans as plugged-in to their mobiles as they are to their iPods.

Jamie Russell works as a member of the Blyk UK Creative Team, specializing in mobile creative for the Blyk Music channel.

Entry Filed under: Advertising, Mobile, Music