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Thursday, February 16, 2006
Ng: Music as driver of digital economy
By Wilson Ng
Wired Desktop
More and more people nowadays are seen carrying mp3 players. Members of my family and even some friends, who don’t listen to music as much as other people, are no exception.
I did some research on it and found out that digital music is big — in fact, according to a study, music is not only the most popular consumer product worldwide, it also, together with television, drives the digital economy.
Here are some statistics I was able to get:
There were over 420 million single tracked records that were downloaded last year, which is almost 20 times more than two years ago, even at the height of the Napster free peer-to-peer network. These were complete songs, excluding music people downloaded to their phones as ring tones. In fact, music download is reported to be an over-a-billion-dollar business in 2005.
Sixty percent of the downloaded songs were saved in computers and mp3 players while 40 percent were stored in cell phones.
In 2005, Apple announced that it has sold over 40 million iPods since it introduced the gadget a few years back. In the same year, a total of 60 million digital music players were also sold. The figure did not include Nokia’s sale of over 40 million cell phones which were capable of playing music. Digital music was said to have accounted for over six percent of recording companies’ sales, and the figure is rapidly growing.
Here’s another outstanding statistic: There are now over two million songs and 165,000 albums that are available online for download. The United States, of course, leads the statistics.
It is estimated that in 2005, Americans downloaded over 353 million song tracks online, with an average of about seven million songs weekly. The leading markets in Europe were Great Britain (over 26 million songs downloaded in 2005) and Germany (over 21 million songs). It is estimated that over 25 percent of singles are now bought online in Great Britain.
Other than pure mp3 players, the number of cell phones that are capable of playing music is growing. In one survey, a third of the world’s mobile phone users indicated that listening to music would be one of top five applications they use in cell phones.
Of course, this is also driven by the 3G technology, which was only recently introduced in the Philippines. Smart just announced the service in limited areas.
In Japan, 3G has been in use for sometime. In fact, over 70 percent of mobile phones in Japan are now 3G capable.
One of the fastest growing 3G areas is South Korea, which has 40 million mobile phone subscribers. South Korea has a population of 48 million people.
Incidentally, in Hong Kong, there are more cell phones sold than the total population, which means many people own more than one mobile phone.
In south Korea, over 10 million of the 40 million cell phones sold are 3G capable. Melon, South Korea’s number one music site, is reputed to have two million subscribers and a catalog of over 800,000 songs.
I am sure that in the Philippines, the number of mobile phone users who download songs online will also increase. With 3G, it will even grow more rapidly. Unfortunately, there are no available statistics on this. But then, almost everybody I have called already have special ring tones. What is yours?
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 16, 2006 issue)
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