8/15/2005

Music downloads to phones dominate Japanese market
Music downloads via cell phones outpaced those to digital music players by a wide margin in Japan during the first six months of 2005, according to data released last week….
Cell phone downloads including complete songs and ring tone melodies totaled 108.9 million songs during the first half of the year and were worth 13.6 billion yen ($123 million as of June 30, the last day of the period), according to figures from the Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ)…
In contrast, legal music downloads from the Internet to devices like portable music players totaled 2.2 million songs and were worth 538.8yen million during the same period, the RIAJ said.
Those figures mean cell phone downloads accounted for 98 percent of the market by song and 96 per cent by value during the first half….

In Get abused by your Japanese cellphone, I mentioned how Japanese consumers were with to pay more than $3 USD per song to download songs to their cellphone (which cannot be saved and played on any other device, computer or media).
Basically Japanese are paying dearly to rent music they cannot save. This is of course the way intellectual property laws now work. You don’t own any of the content, you just own the media and the right to listen to it. Bah.

Also see wireless.3yen.com’s story about Yuki and the bunny cellphone.