Jeff Random

“Why DRM Will Kill Mobile Music – Now, how this all affects mobile is that there will be a huge tide of MP3 players from a number of different vendors coming into the market, in the form of music-enabled phones. So what’s going to happen when you’ve got all these different phones being billed by carriers as iPod killers or replacements and people come to find out their music won’t play on them, or they can only listen to music that’s been bought from one specific store or service? They’re going to get pissed off, that’s what’s going to happen. They won’t buy music that’s tied to a specific device or has onerous limitations on what they can do with it — which will probably rule out any carrier’s download store from being a success. Regardless of how the record labels see things, people want to own their music, and owning music means being able to do with it what you like, and play it on whatever device you want. This means that vendors that focus on syncing, rather than playing along with carriers’ dowload shop dreams, will be the winners. Few operators understand this, though, and their stranglehold on the retail channel means it’s going to be hard for manufacturers to succeed.”

Sounds like another market opportunity for a paradigm buster – The open platform handset.

Ship it with the preloaded with emulators for the basic/free phone for all of the major carriers & they become unable to stop it.

Personalized content like ringtones, wallpaper etc become free/easy just like sounds/wallpapers for your PC today. Music unencumbered by DRM is just an upload away.

Users who want music, videos, games & data on their mobile will go where they get the best value. Super users become leading edge volunteer developers. Third party applications & innovations enable leading edge distributed R&D at little cost.

See where I’m going with this?