Caller ring back tone commands 65-70% mobile music sales in India

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Caller ring back tone (CRBT)—a single music-based application— commands close to 65-70% of all the mobile music sales in the country.

All other applications that include monophonic, polyphonic ringtones, truetones/mastertones, full track download, video download etc together account for the rest of 30-35% of the $228 million mobile music purchases, according to Sudhanshu Sarronwala, CEO, Soundbuzz—a pan-Asian music provider—recently acquired by Motorola.

This is in contrast to the US, European and Australian mobile music market where the application accounts for a negligible share. Soundbuzz claims that mobile music retail sales have overtaken the physical sales in the first quarter of 2007 in India.

According to Soundbuzz, consumers have spent around $228 million on mobile music while they have spent $168 million on buying CDs and cassettes in the country. The company estimates that mobile music sale will outsell physical at the Asia Pacific region level in 2008 and at a global level in early 2009.

However PwC had recently estimated that the industry size of digital music in India at $0.8 million while that of physical sales at $6.5 billion.

Most of the handset manufacturers like Nokia, Motorola etc are working on adding more music enabling features in their new sets, that shows how much potential they foresee in the mobile music business. Many of Nokia’s N-series handsets offer 100 pre-loaded songs for free.

Sony Ericsson is reportedly working on its personal digital assistant with MP3 players and Walkman phone line. According to the Pricewaterhouse Coopers-Ficci report, online music has grown at the rate of 33% last year. Mobile music has emerged as a significant revenue earning opportunity since last 3-4 years.

The meteoric growth of mobile music market in India is attributed to expanding mobile phone ownership that crossed the 230-million mark by the end of 2007.

“The mobile phone service providers have also realised the importance of mobile music as a value added service and they are investing more on marketing their mobile music products,” said Sarronwala.