Our take...
Artist and genre based mobile music stores are particularly popular in Japan, the second largest mobile music market, with consumers subscribing to a particular artist or genre rather than a general music service. This is the first time, however, that a major label has launched an artist based store in the UK. With physical music revenues dropping from £2.6bn in 2001 to £1.4bn by 2008 in the UK, following a particularly disastrous 2007, labels are looking for ways to regain their losses. Mobile music has not taken off in the UK like it has in Japan, with people preferring to sideload music from computer to mobile rather than pay for over the air downloads. Labels and service providers are therefore looking for ways to encourage consumers to pay for over the air music downloads, such as bundling music subscriptions with voice tariffs or into handsets like Nokia's Comes With Music. Artist based sites work similarly to fan sites and can attract users to pay for content that is more relevant to them. The user can access all the content for artists they like in one service rather than browse through a catalogue of tracks or artists without guaranteed success. However, in terms of the content being offered, Screen Digest believes that it is unlikely that users will pay £3.50 for ringtones when a large proportion of mobile devices support MP3 tracks as ringtones in the UK. The addition of concert ticket sales or tour information would likely increase traction to the sites.