According to a report in the Sunday Times music phones such as the Sony Ericsson Walkman series are selling at a faster rate than the iPod did in its first few years.
Apple last week sold their 100 millionth iPod but from 2001 to 2004 they only achieved sales of 4 million units. It wasn’t until the iPod Mini was released that sales really took off.
Sony Ericsson are announcing sales figures this week and will report sales of 17million Walkman phones last year, and a total of more than 20 million since they were first introduced just over 18 months ago.
According to the report, Nokia are developing an iTunes style music store:
Nokia’s research suggests that 60% of customers now use their phone’s music-playing capabilities. Mark Squires, at Nokia UK, said the big change had been digital storage capacity. “We’ve now got 2GB [gigabyte] memory cards for £15,” he said. “Most people can quite happily store most of their music in a couple of gigs [of storage]. Phones have grown to be able to hold your music library, and before they couldn’t.”
Tim Grimsditch at Frukt, a specialist music consultancy, said: “I don’t doubt that mobile phones will eventually destroy the stand-alone music-player market.” He said the last key barrier for the mobile-phone firms was ease-of-use, an area in which Apple excels. “They’ll get there,” said Grimsditch. “And then the end will be pretty swift.”
Nokia is trying to make it easier for customers to work with their existing library of digital music. In the next two or three months it will also challenge iTunes with the launch its own online music store, building on last year’s $60m acquisition of Loudeye, a digital music specialist.
