Month: May

Full Text:

Apple appears to be set to upgrade their iPhone to a 3rd generation. The product is easily the phone with the biggest impact on mobile music on the market to date. While only 6.7% of mobile phone users listen to music on their phone, 74.1% of iPhone customers use their iPhone as an MP3 player. Most of these consumers transfer their songs via computer connection. The new iPhone supposedly may be able to use cellular networks to download music, rather than current iPhones that use a slower, older network for downloading tracks. This would give faster downloading and a much larger coverage to customers, and probably increase music downloading more significantly. While Apple continues to run with its successful product, other phone companies try to keep up. Smart phone company Research in Motion (RIM), who makes Blackberry, owns the largest share of the smart phone market, but Apple is closing in. In an effort to fight off Apple, the two latest Blackberrys, the Pearl and the Curve, are aimed at the high-end music market. They each have available applications such as MediaGuide (service that identifies songs on the radio), streaming XM radio, and a pending full-track downloading service from PureTracks. Verizon is also trying to make music more widely available for all of its phones. Teaming up with Rhapsody and its newly acquired Urge music service from MTV, Verizon is the mobile platform for these music services. Since smart phones only cover a small part of the market, Verizon hopes to capitalize on the rest of the consumers with these new music phones.