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Watching the final Spanish parliament debates on the reform of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia yesterday I had to made a comparison between the conservatory Partido Popular, led by Mariano Rajoy - not even willing to debate on the subject, and certain issues within the Mobile Music evolution. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, president of Spain, explained he wants to listen to the Catalan people and create a dialogue to make changes possible to achieve consensus. Concluding the PP doesn’t want to listen to its people is an understatement, you have to know that the reform has been voted by 90% of the Catalan Parliament!

But what has this to do with my little story here? I wanted to refer to some media companies and telco operators claiming the Mobile Music market space - not listening (enough) to their customers. I’ll explain…

First let us look at the definition of “mobile music”. According Wikipedia: “Mobile music is music, which is downloaded to mobile phones and played by mobile phones”, a pretty straightforward but clear explanation.

© optimobile

With the introduction of the hybrid phones we will have to make a difference between ringtones, realtones, mp3 files downloaded through an operators network and the ones downloaded from an internet shop and which we transfer through wi-fi. bluetooth or usb from our PC or other device to our mobile to listen to music, or what did you expect?

Ringtones, realtones and full track mp3 downloads are DRM controlled by the operators; this means when you copy an mp3 song from your PC to your phone you cannot set it as a ringtone since it has not been downloaded through the operators network and cannot be recognised since the tune has not neccesarily the same excrypted DRM as for example the iTunes song you downloaded - though an Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) encoded song downloaded from iTunes can be transferred to 4 different devices legally.

Ok I can listen to the songs on my phone but I cannot set them as a ringtone, so we have to differentiate the user experience here. Why? The hybrid phones are gonna change our behaviour how we use the phone and its functions… Apart from the communication and organizing functions, the mobile phone nowadays is used to express oneself (ringtones), play (games), listen (to music) and share things (talk/sms/pictures/files/music/videos).

Some functions will still be controlled by the operators but there’s gonna be changes in the game. The ringtones we use to express ourselves are still gonna be used but it’s pretty obvious people will not play -operator only- downloaded songs on their mobile; they’ll play music on their mobile but it’s not gonna be the mobile music as we know it. I never understood why most operators are spending so much money and energy in trying to claim the ‘mobile music’ space on the mobile that is to say - drm enabled full track mp3 downloads. Soon this is not gonna be ‘their space only’ anymore once the hybrid phones are widespread on the market.

Let’s look at this now from the end-user perspective. Let’s take my personal family situation: 2 adults, 3 kids each with a mobile. We all still buy a ringtone once in a while (to express ourselves!) but let’s focus on the full track downloads for a while. When buying music we download from iTunes and we still buy cd’s. The songs of the artists we all like we copy to eachothers’ devices for private and family use, I have written on that before. Let’s say we pay an average 15 $ per cd with 10-15 songs on it in 320 kbps quality!

Now, according mobile music players current strategies, if we all like the same tune, we all need to download a full track at 3$ a piece. That’s 15 $ for 1 song on 5 different devices for less good quality (average 128 kbps). Well anybody can see that this just ain’t gonna work IRL. Mobile music is going to be shared from device to device the same way it is shared through p2p networks and pc’s.

And yes there will be areas where people don’t have a pc connected to the internet to download songs and those users will download over 3G networks but I don’t think they gonna do it either 5 times at 3$ for the same song, no?

Is it because operators and the music industry giants want to impose a new model? Have they forgot that other succesfull applications like sms and ringtones have been succesfull because they have been rapidly, socially natural but virally distributed and used by the users themselves? One thing is sure here, my family isn’t gonna pay that much money a couple of times for the same song of less good quality. Are we the only ones?

BTW: anyone heard about the Mobile DRM Convergence? Sharpen your pencils, surely a topic for the coming months. How fast can you go?