How Big is Cellphone Ringtone Market

An article in Economist (Apr 17, 04) points out:

Ringtone sales were $3.5 billion worldwide in 2003, up by 40% from 2002. Eurpoe and Asia lead the way. Yankee Group raised its estimate of last year’s sales in America from $50m to $80m. Sales of ringtones, each costing upto $4 each, have now overtaken those of CD singles. Many artists now make more money from the former than the latter. Ringtone sales also outstrip legal internet download services, such as Apple’s iTunes, which generated under $100m worldwide last year.

Both moibile operators and record companies sense huge opportunity here. Anyone can make a ringtone out of a pop song, provided they pay royalties. But ‘true tones’ – actual music clips – require the record companies to license the master recording. They will do so only to trusted partners – such as mobile network operators.

A.T. Kearney says mobile downloads could account for 20-30% of music sales by 2006.

Quite a revelation to me that tiny ringtones can be such a huge business.

Linux – for ‘Transaction Workers’ not for ‘Info Workers’

Economist (Apr 17, 04) has an article:

Linux’s main appeal is likely to be to companies rather than home users. And even companies are unlikely to ditch their Windows PCs for the employees that Microsoft calls ‘information workers’ – the lawyers, consultants, accountants and so forth who use presentation application, spreadsheets, fancy graphics and the like. Linux is perfect, on the other hand, for call centers, cash tellers, customer-support departments and other types of work that require employees to use only the same one or two computer functions (and whom their employers might actually want to discourage from goofing off with other applications while on the job). Instead of the ‘information worker’, says Mr. Fink [HP’s Linux boss], he is targeting the ‘transaction worker’.

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