OPEN-ENDED PREDICTIONS

Just as Nostradamus' non-specific vision of the end of the world will, eventually, come true, so to will the bold words of IFPI market research director, Keith Jopling. His bold claim?

"Everyone has a phone. Anytime from this year mobile [music downloads] could be bigger than online."

A market research director who assumes that "everyone has a phone" capable of receiving music downloads. Interesting, that - we have a mobile, it's true, but because it's a thing we use for ringing up home and asking if we should buy a bottle of milk, it's quite happily incapable of accepting musical downloads. And even if it could, we'd be reluctant to spend money to download music to a device with poor storage capacity, meaning we'd probably have to delete the last song we bought to make way for a new one.

Ah, but Jopling has thought of that:

Many more specialist phones are expected to compete with portable digital devices like the iPod,"

Well, this is sort of true. Although many commentators are expecting them to be launched and then go the same way of those horse-frighteners with the big keyboards; what would make a phone desirable as a music player would make it useless as a phone. But even if you could create a phone to ape what is done by an mp3 player, without making it horrible as a phone, you'd have to ensure it could cope with shuttling people's music off of their PCs anyway - which would instantly free people from the clutches of the DRM-hobbled and overpriced mobile downloads.

music IFPI