Great post from Carlo at MobHappy following up on a post about mobile music at MocoNews. Besides the hysterical quote about peeing your pants to keep warm, I think Carlo also adds some great commentary:
Full-track downloading really is a pretty boring mobile music application, when the platform’s capable of delivering much more interactivity, and services could build on the core communications functionality of the mobile platform. If there’s no money in downloads, leave that market to online providers, or find a cheaper alternative to setting up your own shop, and offer better services. And if you insist on trying to sell downloads, don’t hamstring them with copy protection so they’re locked to a phone, or worse yet, to a particular service.
Very nice, I agree. Figuring out what those alternative applications are should be what folks are working on, but for the most part that doesn’t seem to be the case. So what kinds of applications could those possibly be? I personally think that discovery services could work out pretty well, although of course I have no data to back that up. Think something like PhoneTags and I think that starts off in the right direction.
Think of the phone as a recepticle for music that you can keep with you and I think you’re missing much of the point of the mobile phone. Pure convergence without adding anything. The phone has a network interface, if you just pump the music down over it that’s not very inventive. Allow it to pull information from the world around me, a-la PhoneTags, and that’s starting to get better. Deliver me some info about what friends are listening to, or popular chart toppers I can sample from, also not bad.
This is really building off the whole “mobile as the remote control for your life” idea, which has a very natural evolution into integration with home media systems. Full track downloads into a mobile in some proprietary format is a dead end.. unless you see the mobile as the persistent core processing and storage unit as that next step of evolution. And I think even Nokia has decided now that just isn’t going to be the case. It’s better to start thinking about how to access all that media information out there and integrate with it rather than trying to force yourself unnaturally into the center.
