But music on-demand clients and ringback tones? That's another story, says Robert Riccitelli.
RealNetworks says it is seeing encouraging growth in demand from European operators for its range of mobile music services – but not for streaming apps to take on Spotify.
“We’ve just launched our tenth music on-demand service with Mobilkom Austria, where we’ve seen a very good initial takeup of the service, and we continue to serve the major Vodafone markets,” says Robert Riccitelli, vice president of Real’s TPS division in EMEA.
“There are a couple of other services in different operators that we plan to launch between now and the end of the year. Operators are having good success with it: in some cases they view the music as helping them generate demand for data plans. There’s certainly a demographic that cares more about music or video than they do about email.”
Several record labels have suggested that mobile music revenues are disappointing in recent times – or at least not growing as fast as they would like. What’s Riccitelli’s view, and how is RealNetworks trying to fix it?
“We can see the example of the BlackBerry Storm with Vodafone UK, where our music service was on the handset,” he says. “Because of the user interface, the presentation and getting the music client icon on the first screen, the music service was much more front-and-centre. That awareness factor has definitely helped.”
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Riccitelli says Vodafone Spain’s decision to bundle music with its data tariffs has also helped increase music usage from its customers.
“There’s still a market for the all-you-can-eat service, maybe not as a standalone service, which is more of a niche for the heavy user, but bundled with other things such as data services,” he says.
What about streaming music? Spotify has been getting headlines left, right and centre for its iPhone app, which was approved by Apple last week. Meanwhile, app stores are filling up with other mobile music applications that stream over 3G or Wi-Fi.
Is RealNetworks seeing any demand from operators for it to provide them with a streaming app of this nature? It seems not.
“I wouldn’t say there’s been any significant change in [operators’] views on streaming,” says Riccitelli. “It presents a few more network challenges and complexity than downloads, so we haven’t noticed significantly more interest.”
Ringback tones? That’s another story. Riccitelli says RealNetworks has seen “good growth” in that area from its three European customers: TMN in Portugal, Vodafone Turkey and Vodafone Germany, with another Vodafone territory due to launch RBTs “in the first part of next year”.
“It’s growing at a good pace, with good penetration rates,” he says. “We’re seeing more interest from operators every month – and certainly stronger interest than in streaming.”
