Warner Music chief Edgar Bronfman Jr has been talking up the future of the mobile music sector at the mobile industry's big annual junket in Barcelona, 3GSM. He told the conference this week: "Wireless companies will become the most important distributors of music content. The mobile platform represents by far and away the biggest opportunity for entertainment generally and music specifically".
He added that while the mobile music business was already producing encouraging results, the music and mobile industries should work together to create better consumer experiences, so to maximize the sector's potential. He said: "The opportunity for mobile is huge and it is remarkable that we are selling as much music as we are on mobiles given how difficult it is to access. The average ring-tone download is two and a half minutes and takes 20 clicks. If you could make that two or three clicks, if you could make that 10 seconds, the amount of revenue that would unlock is extraordinary".
Confirming that Warner was actively pursuing mobile partnerships in "China, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Europe, the Americas and now, as of today... the Middle East and North Africa", Bronfman added that mobile offered perhaps the most potential in countries like China and India where both traditional internet and physical CD sale infrastructures had never been fully established.
"This is all leapfrog technology", he said, in reference to mobile in those markets, "skipping over the era of physical telecom infrastructure and, specific to music, also largely bypassing the CD and cassette, and going straight to mobile music. So what we have is a major step forward, both for consumers and for those companies seeking to meet their needs".
Of course Bronfman has long been an advocate of the potential of the mobile music sector, though last time he got excited about it all he and his business partners were way ahead of their time and nearly crippled the world's biggest record company as a result. Not wishing to drag up the past or anything, but there was quite a good summary of that story in the Washington Post this week, which I thought we should share: "It's ironic that Bronfman is preaching mobile because he and his family nearly got destroyed by a Frenchman doing the same thing about seven years ago. Jean-Marie Messier, a French investment banker, was head of Vivendi, a water company that got into the entertainment business. He seduced Bronfman into a merger with the dream that kids on Paris's Left Bank wanted to download music and video to their cell phones. Messier may have been right, but he was ahead of his time. He nearly bankrupted the company by [expanding too fast]. He's long gone. But Bronfman remains and he's resurrecting his rep at Warner, where he's trying to lead the big music labels into the mobile era".