Music playing phones are the UK's favourite kind of music device according to a release by the Entertainment Retailers Association based on research by GfK. They report that 32 million MP3 players are now sold every year, three quarters of which are MP3-player-mobile-phone combos like the iPhone. MP3 player sales now outsell CD players five to one.
All of which suggests that the digital music revolution is reaching maturity and, as the mobile firms keep telling us, mobile music is the future of digital. That said, it's perhaps worth wondering how many of the 44 million MP3-playing phones sold in the last two years were bought because of their music playing capabilities, and how many are used as a primary music playing device. I've had my MP3-playing phone for two years now and have never used it to play music. I did put five MP3s on it once, but by that point had lost the headphones that came with it (why do mobile phones have to have totally different headphone sockets to every other device?) so have never actually got round to playing them.
Still, that's no reason to not run a quote from ERA Digital chief Russel Coultart is it? He told CMU: "Never in the history of the music business have we seen a format take off like this before. There is now no doubt that MP3 is the fastest-growing music format of all time, faster than vinyl, cassette or CD. MP3's ability to compress lots of music into a small amount of memory makes it ideal for portable devices like mobile phones and MP3 players. The MP3 is the CD of the download world. The beauty of the MP3 is that it plays on everything".
As previously reported, ERA has become a big supporter of the MP3 as the digital music format of choice, and has launched a new logo to be carried by download platforms who sell tracks in that format, as opposed to less compatible and/or proprietary formats.