Daniel Dolan aloha

Music and the Internet

The July issue of First Monday, an online, peer-reviewed journal, has re-published my 2000 essay on mobile Internet and music in a special issue titled Music and the Internet. I added some opening comments to the original essay.

Mobile Music in Japan

I am revising an essay I wrote in 2000 for firstmonday about the convergence of music file sharing and mobile internet, and it is amazing to see how mobile phone technology has developed during the past five years. In 2001, midi-generated song melodies ("chaku-mero" in Japan) were a huge hit, but now mobile phones ("keitai") can download and store entire song files ("chaku-uta") similar to what ipod does with mp3 files. And you can't order pizza with your ipod.

Look for chaku-uta in japan to be an enormous and growing business opportunity for music labels, third party vendors and carriers--because in japan these players have worked out revenue sharing schemes. Hopefully artists will do OK too.