Mobile Entertainment

In the highly corporate world of mobile content, what a rare delight it is to hear a successful CEO ascribing his considerable success to pimps, bitches and hos. No, Andrew Bud hasn’t had a personality-changing bump on the head.

This is Mike Johns, founder of Urban World Wireless. Johns almost single-handedly created the market in ‘urban’, predominantly African-American targeted, mobile entertainment when he launched the firm in 2001.

Today, Urban World Wireless remains a potent force in the US and beyond. It even has a spin-off digital label, Udubmusic….

ME: How did it all start?
Mike Johns: I’d been working for a hip hop magazine called Rap Page, and it seemed obvious to me that the best way to get news to fans was via the phone. Kids in urban areas couldn’t afford PCs and only had access to email if they were in college. At the time, lots of rappers were keen on getting blinged up with mobile – we had front covers where they’d be using pagers and so on, so we started to send out alerts to those Motorola two-way pagers that everyone was using back then. It just grew real fast, and we ended up with a big database – 50,000 by 2003.

What was your business plan?
There was no business plan! We never gave a thought to monetising the service. We just wanted to get the news out.
How did you recruit subscribers?

Mostly word of mouth. We signed up members in person. We’d even sign up their whole contacts list at the same time.

Meanwhile, radio stations were catching on to what we were doing and they’d read out our news and plug what we were doing.

How did this turn into a commercial service?
Well, the record companies saw that we had valuable community and they started adding text tags to our news round-ups. Soon we had live events advertising too, and the thing just started to grow.

By 2001, the ringtone market was taking off and we began to record our own voicetones. We got lots of distribution, but the big deal for us was when T-Mobile replaced the Motorola pager with the Sidekick, which became a seriously popular phone with our community. Although everything we did was created in-house, soon the labels started using us to distribute their content too.

What were the highlights of that phase?
We sold this ‘Pimptone’ product by the comedian Katt Williams where he would shout: ‘You have a ho on the line.’ That went triple platinum for us.

Have you noticed a squeeze on ringtone sales?
Oh yeah, the ringtone and voicetone market has definitely been damaged. No doubt about that. But it’s just moved us in new directions. We launched a digital music label called Udubmusic because we know so many artists who want to move in this direction. They trust us to help them. We’ll offer ringtones, full-tracks, videos… and we already have 60 artists signed up.

The way the market is changing has also led us to re-invent what we did at the start, with the news service. We’re now live on the Apple App store with Udub news, but it’s ad-funded and features richer content like video clips.

So you’ve kind of come full circle
I have big ambitions for Urban World in the news space. During Hurricane Katrina it was clear African-Americans don’t have a news service that speaks to them. I want to take our news all over the world, using entertainment as the candy.

Tell us about ‘Google me, bitch’
That was just a phrase we started using, so we had some t-shirts printed and took them to CTIA. Our attorneys weren’t sure about it, but everyone wanted one – even Google people. I was in the UK recently and sent one to the Queen. I never found out whether she wore it.