Ad Support Key to Mobile Music’s Future

Mobile Marketer spoke with John du Pre Gauntt, a senior analyst at eMarketer about what’s in store for the mobile music industry. The big changes he expects to see in 2008 include more ad-supported services and lower prices for individual song downloads, down from the typical $1.99 to the 99 cents per song commonly associated with PC-based services.

Gauntt warns that record labels need to respond to consumer expectations, not fight them, if they want the mobile music market to reach its potential and grow beyond ringtones and single song downloads.

He also noted that the “iTunes music economy” is more advanced than that of mobile music and that mobile needs to find a way to “finally get a value chain of carriers and enablers and to get a nearly standardized deal for the Internet music economy.”

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