January 11, 2005
"Mobile Music Japan"
Excerpts from a new pay-for study by EuroTechnology on Mobile Music in Japan.
"It is safe to say, that there are more wireless music downloads of 20-30 second long "chaku uta" songs to mobile phones in Japan, then there are i-Tunes downloads on the wired internet.
This fact promises a fantastic success for the i-Tunes/Motorola cooperation.
Chaku-Uta-Full are full songs downloaded to mobile phones via KDDI/AU's 2.4 Mbps 3G mobile network.
Chaku-uta-full started on November 19, 2004 and achieved 1 million downloads within 48 days.
While polyphonic ringing tones (chaku-melo) have been developed to play 64 notes simultaneously, and have found many applications beyond pure ringing tones, the polyphonic ringtone (Chaku-melo) market in Japan is coming closer to saturation.
Ears and service providers' work and investors' attention are turning to MPEG
We project that mobile music has the potential to become a major, if not the major, music distribution channel in terms of value in Japan, replacing CDs and DVDs.
At the moment mobile music sales in Japan are around US$ 1 Billion/year. As DoCoMo's HSDPA services come online and more handsets are sold for full song downloads we expect a dramatic increase of mobile music sales.
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