Mobile Music: Digital Music Distribution Over Mobile Networks
...physical to digital music distribution is bound to have profound implications on the music industry. So far, most of the activity related to digital music distribution has been centred on the fixed Internet. In the meantime, mobile operators have been making significant investments in extending their network capabilities to support data services. This paper includes an analysis of the current situation of music delivery in mobile networks, as well as future prospects enabled by the technical evolution of mobile networks. The overall feasibility, and the potentially most viable forms of, mobile music business are studied.
Key Words
Music industry, mobile communications, digital distribution, e-commerce, information economics.
1. Introduction
Until recently, ownership of recorded music has been always tied to a physical medium. The introduction of new encoding techniques, most notably the MP3 format, together with other technological developments towards the turn of the millennium have detached music from any physical medium. One of the most fundamental implications of this technological development is that it enables digital distribution of music. This has profound implications on the music industry, which heavily relies on physical distribution models. Initially disdained by the incumbent industry players, this new distribution channel has until recently only been successful as a channel for pirated content, enabled by a wave of peer-to-peer distribution technologies, effectively draining revenues from the incumbent players.
A second wave of digital music distribution soon followed, with the intent of diverting users from pirated content from peer-to-peer networks, while still offering the benefits enabled by digital music distribution. So far we have witnessed the success of at least one of the commercial services that is based on digital music...
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