Musical future for phones

Analyst Bill Thompson apparently almost missed the 3G phenomenon, which kind of casts anything he says on the subject into a little bit of doubt. He’s come around though, convinced by his sons enthusiasm for the technology and contrasting it with his own generation. “Anyone of my generation, with failing eyesight and the view that ‘there’s never anything worth watching on TV’, is hardly going to embrace these phones.”
He goes on to say that the killer app for 3G will be music videos, as opposed to just music. He also opines that 3G phones will eventually replace iPods, saying “if I had to bet on the long term I would go for content on demand over carrying gigabytes in my pocket”. Of course, the difference is that when you buy an MP3 and store it in an iPod you have it for good, whereas if you download a song to a mobile to listen to once before replacing it with something else you have to pay to download it again. I agree that on-demand content would be at least as compelling as the buy and store model, as long as the content is very cheap (or of a fixed price for unlimited downloads) and the content doesn’t dissappear from the service. At the moment a lot of content offered by 3G carriers is only available for a short while, which isn’t very useful for content on demand.