The phone-y music business
Vodaphone, the biggest cell phone company in the world, has launched a music download service for mobile phones. It's expensive and there isn't much content-about $2.75 per track, and there are only 3,000 songs available??but it's a start.
What it's a start of is another question. MP3s are still widely available for free online, despite record industry lawsuits. The 3G phones that Vodaphone and others are supplying still allow people to transfer songs to them from a PC via Bluetooth or USB. File-swapping exploded when digital music was expensive and scarce, and that sure looks like the mobile model to me, at least for now. It's possible that Europeans' love for their cell phones will change the dynamic, but last time I checked, Europeans also love eDonkey.
That said, this is early days, and the first release of anything can't be viewed as anything but a market test. When the carriers and labels realize that expensive scarcity is still a bad model, they'll likely bring prices down to the iTunes level.
