Seattle firm looking to get in on Chinese mobile music market
Seeking to tap into China’s market of some 350 million mobile phone subscribers, Seattle’s Melodeo has formed a joint venture with Access China, a subsidiary of Access, a Japanese internet technology provider. The joint venture “will launch the first platform in China to deliver secure digital content through wireless operators and other mobile-service providers.” According to its website, Melodeo provides “an all-in-one mobile music system … to Mobile Operators. This system lets users shop for music on their mobile phone, download it to the mobile phone and listen to it anywhere or any time in high quality stereo.”
The enormous number of Chinese mobile phone users is no doubt enticing to companies like Melodeo. A fair number of pundits think mobile phone downloads is the killer app that will turn things around for the piracy-riddled music industry in China. Of course, in China the potential users of a wireless, for-pay music download service are probably a relatively small subset of the 350 million mobile phone users. Couple that with the fact that the price Chinese consumers are willing to pay for per-song downloads is something far lower than the 99-cent US price-point, and it might be a challenging business model to sustain. Of course, the biggest challenge to the music-over-mobile business model is unauthorized P2P file sharing, which is rampant in China, and threatens the future of any for-profit online (or mobile phone-based) music retail business model.
