Live from London, we’re liveblogging our own Mobile Music In The Dock event, for which we’ve gathered expert witnesses, canny prosecution and defence teams, and a raucous (we hope) jury to decide whether mobile music is living up to the industry’s expectations. Read on, and refresh for the latest entries…18.35: We’re about to get underway, but here’s a rundown of who’s who tonight. The prosecutor is Jeremy Silver QC from Sibelius Software, while the defence counsel is Ralph Simon QC from the Mobile Entertainment Forum.Expert witnesses include Paul Kenny (Global Head of Music, Vodafone), Tim Grimsditch (Global Product Marketing, Nokia Music), Mark Mulligan (Senior Analyst, Jupiter Research), Scott Cohen (Founder, The Orchard), Paul Lee (Deloitte) and Gary McClarnan (Sparklestreet).The judge? Our own Paul Brindley. No, he’s not wearing a dusty wig. We did try to persuade him. Read on for the report of what happens, as it happens.18.40: Jeremy Silver kicks us off with a punchy introduction. Mobile music is letting down consumers, artists aren’t happy with it, and it’s generally not living up to expectations. To paraphrase him. He also has the legal lingo down pat, which may sway the jury either way.18.43: Ralph Simon with some opening remarks for the defence. He can throw around the legal terms too, naturally. “We will be able to show, with the witnesses we have here this evening, that this whole area of mobile music – and most importantly the promise of what it’s bringing to the economy of music, can certainly be justified. We think we’ve got a pretty persuasive and we hope a conclusive case to prove.”18.45: First witness is Mark Mulligan from Forrester, speaking for the prosecution. He kicks off by explaining the size of the mobile music market. “It’s a reasonable sized market – around about 900 million Euros in Europe this year. But the majority of that is ringtones. The online downloads market completely out-shines over-the-air [mobile] downloads.”He also points out that European OTA music sales are completely dwarfed by OTA sales in Japan. Is that showing how much potential there is in Europe for mobile music? Not so, he says. “Just because something is popular in Japan, doesn’t mean it will be popular in Europe. In fact, the opposite is often the case.”He accepts that Comes With Music and PlayNow Plus have “a huge amount of potential, but they’re not about to change the mobile music market anytime soon”. They’ll take a while to work because of handset replacement cycles, because people need to grasp the concepts, and because people who market them can’t – for various reasons – market them to their full potential.Mulligan thinks the differentiation between mobile and online music is going to disappear. He points to what Apple is doing with iPhone – you buy from the iTunes online store with a credit card. Also Nokia Comes With Music, where you sideload tunes on. “The big forces in online music are trying to make mobile music as a separate entity disappear.”18.50: Ralph Simon cross-examines Mark, and picks up on the blurring of the boundaries between mobile and online music. He admits that more and more people are experiencing music on a mobile device – “if we’re talking about playing music on a mobile phone, that market is opening up. If we’re talking about people downloading music over the air, that market is not opening up.”In other words, Simons’ point is that people are keener and keener on mobile music – listening to it on a phone – whereas Mulligan is saying they’re not interested in downloading it over the air. They’re essentially not disagreeing with each other, when you think about it.18.55: Simons calls his first witness, Paul Lee from Deloitte. His evidence is going to focus on the history of mobile music, starting in – cor – 2003. The days when you downloaded music at a rate of 40 Kbit/s, paid
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