music download through wireless: a business doomed to fail

Yesterday Verizon announced a service to allow people to download songs over the cellualr network to cell phones, at double the price of iTunes. Several months ago, Sprint annoucement similar service.

I just don't understand what these companies are thinking. This type of service is doomed to fail from the beginning. How can they compete with iTunes, which is cheaper and much easier to use? Furthermore, why do you have to click through the tiny screen of a cell phone in order to buy a song, when you can easily do that on the comfort of a home PC. In what situation do you really need to buy a song right away on a cell phone network, and you can't wait to get home to buy it on a PC?

I think these companies don't understand the difference between content consumption and content acquisition and management. Cell phones, and other handheld devices (iPod included), are basically for content consumption only. PC is for content acquisition and management. For content consumption, you don't need many fancy features. Ease of use is the key. That is why iPod is so wildly popular. You can leave the complex functionalities to PC.

Cell phones are getting increasingly more complex. But 99% of the time, I only use it for making phone calls. I wonder how many people are using all of the features that are in the cell phones. To me, a basic voice phone, with embedded MP3 music player will be enough. I can use my PC to load the songs to the phone.

Cell phone operators want to fill up its excess bandwidth (they have got a lot of bandwidth with 3G). But without charging a high price, they won't be able to earn a sufficient return on per bandwidth. That is why they have to charge a higher price than wired song downloads.