Mobile Music

I rarely (never until now I think) discuss songs and albums in this blog. But, I'm making an exception today...

It's not often that I recognize every musical artist in the iTunes top 10 songs list. But, this is the case at the moment because there are only two artists represnted in the top 10. The Black Eye Peas have two songs at #2 and #4. But, the rest of the top 10 are all songs by the late great Michael Jackson. The iTunes Albums top 10 is also dominated by MJ. He postumously owns 7 of the top 10 albums in that list including all 5 of the top 5.

Looking further down the songs list, MJ another three songs at positions 12, 17 and 19. The first Jackson 5 song appears at 26 with another two appearing at 27 and 32. If I counted correctly, there are 40 Michael Jackson songs in the top 100. If you add the 3 Jackson 5 songs and the 1 Jacksons song, MJ is on 44 of the top 100 songs.

With the possible exception of the eventual passing of Paul McCartney (which I hope won't happen until many years from now), we may never see an iTunes chart domination like this again.

If you have a first generation Zune 30GB device, you might remember that it stopped working on December 31, 2008 because it was a leap year and the Zune decided it didn't work on day 366 of that year. Well, your Zune will keep working today (June 16, 2009), but you won't be able to use Zune Social, Zune.net forums and the Zune Marketplace for, perhaps, the entire day. Microsoft sent email to Zune owners explaining that this downtime is due to system maintenance.

So, if you were planning to update podcasts or buy/access new songs from the Zune Marketplace today, you may have to wait a while.

My daughter mentioned she was planning to buy a bunch of songs from iTunes the other day. So, I asked her to participate in a little comparison shopping research for me: I asked her to compare the prices for those songs on iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store and to buy the songs from which ever store cost less.

She looked at 13 relatively recently released songs in both online stores and found the following:

- Apple iTunes Store: 13 songs cost $1.29 each for a total of $16.77
- Amazon MP3 Store: 11 songs cost 99 cents each and 2 cost $1.29 each for a total of $13.47.

So, she saved $3.30 (24.5%) by buying the songs from Amazon instead of Apple.

Does this mean that iTunes is doomed and the Amazon MP3 store will take over the world? I doubt it. But, it does indicate that it pays to do a bit of comparison shopping for your online music purchases.

Country music superstar Kenny Chesney has signed on with Mozes to encourage mobile interaction with his fans throughout his 2009 Corona Extra Sun City Carnival Tour. During the tour, fans can join Chesney's Mozes-powered mobile fan club and text to win seat upgrades and VIP passes to the various shows. Once they're part of Chesney's "mobile mob," fans will also receive exclusive alerts such as pre-sale ticket offers, schedule changes, downloadable content and other goodies.

Other artists that use the Mozes service to connect with fans include Rascal Flatts, Britney Spears, Ciara, The Fray and Kelly Clarkson. The company now claims more than 500 artists with a Mozes widget on their MySpace page or Web site.

US Cellular customers are getting direct access to mSpot's Make-UR-Tones custom ringtone maker. The application lets users download, edit and buy custom ringtones all right on their handset.

Mobile users with phones on US Cellular's new EVDO network will be able to use the application.

Make-UR-Tones has a catalog of more than 400,000 tracks, which mSpot says is some 10 times larger than most other legal ringtone services. Users choose a song and then use the app's editor feature to create a ringtone from their favorite section of the tune, up to 30 seconds in length. They can then purchase and download their custom ringtone for $2.99.

mSpot's Make-UR-Tones service is already offered to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile customers.

Fox Mobile Distribution is growing its content business through deals with AOL Europe and AOL Canada. Under the agreement, FMD will offer its ringtones to users of various AOL properties through integration with the latest version of AOL's Winamp media player.

Basically, Fox will embed ringtone links into Winamp, so when users click to play a specific tune or music from a favorite artist, the player will offer up the chance to buy related ringtones or other relevant content. Winamp will also feature an integrated Jamba- or Jamster-branded purchase page (depending on what country they're in) so they can buy the content without having to leave the Winamp player.

Performing rights organization BMI has released data on US ringback tone services from 2008 along with projections for '09.

According to BMI, revenue from ringback tones, the music a caller hears while waiting for the call to be answered, totaled some $205 million last year, up from $140 million in 2007. The organization's forecast has sales topping $235 million in 2009, up 15% year-over-year.

There's still a whole lot of room for growth in this nascent market. BMI figures that some 10 million US consumers have signed up for a ringback service, which is only about 4% of mobile subscribers.

Verizon Wireless is joining the DRM-free music revolution by adding five million MP3 files to its Media Store. Even more interesting, starting next Tuesday, it will introduce tiered pricing for the individual tracks, something the record labels have been trying to get the online music stores to do since their inception.

New releases and best-sellers will go for $1.29 each, while all other current tunes will go for 99 cents apiece. Most classic catalog tracks can be had for only 69 cents each.

Because the tracks are all in the MP3 format, they're not tethered to a single PC and your Verizon phone - they'll play on any MP3 music device (which includes iPods, but you probably won't be hearing that from Verizon).

Free music streaming service Last.fm plans to disable third-party applications that stream its content to mobile devices. It also intends to start charging a low monthly fee for the service outside the US, UK and Germany, IntoMobile reports.

Apparently, developers have been using undocumented APIs to hook into Last.fm in order to set up a mobile stream. The company will be shutting down those APIs, and making available a "public, documented streaming API." The new API will enable third-party clients, but will prevent mobile streaming.

Last.fm is reportedly cutting off the mobile access in order to comply with its licensing deals. Since the formerly independent site became a part of CBS last year, the whole complying-with-licenses thing should have been expected.

Guess the only folks who'll be listening to the service on a cell phone in the near future will be iPhone owners, since that's the only legit mobile client Last.fm offers.

Japanese mobile operator KDDI au is adding Melodis Corporation's Midomi singing search technology to its Lismo mobile music platform.

Midomi, powered by Melodis's proprietary multimodal adaptive recognition system (MARS), lets users search for and discover songs by singing or humming them. Acknowledging that there are a lot of mediocre and bad singers out there, Midomi was designed to return accurate results even if the user sings or hums off-key, has trouble with the lyrics or messes up the tempo.

KDDI is working with mobile communications solutions provider Sockets to integrate Midomi into its music offering.