So that’s who’s buying James Blunt
Mobile audio is making a recognisable impact on the digital and overall singles and albums markets.
3, sourcing numbers from the Official Charts Company, which compiles the official UK music charts, has said it thinks 53% of mobile audio dowloads in the UK in 2006 were made by its customers.
It also said that sales to its users alone accounted for 3.7% of the combined singles charts and 7.5% of the digital download chart so far in 2006.
If you accept 3’s valuation of its mrket share as 53%, you could hazzard that roughly 15% of all digital downloads are made to a mobile, and that 7% of the overall charts are made up by mobile downloads.
One question that does occur, though, is that since 3 offers a dual-download system, whereby users who dowload a track to their mobile also get rights to a PC download, and vice versa, perhaps there is some double-counting going on.
Nevertheless, the numbers show the impact mobile users are having on sales. Over one in ten sales of James Blunt’s song “Goodbye my Lover” were made over the phone by 3 customers. Hard-Fi sold 7.4% of its song Cash Machine over 3, and Kaiser Chiefs’ “I predict a riot” sold 5.5% of all singles on 3.
With Vodafone said to be cutting data charges for mobile music downloads, it may be other operators will be forced to follow 3 in its flat fee, dual download strategy, with an ever-increasing number of exclusive deals and sponsorships with headlne and up and coming acts.