BMI: Ringback Tones Mobile Music Market Growth in 2008

BMI: Ringback Tones Mobile Music Market Growth in 2008. BMI has released its annual mobile music market projections for 2008 and figures for 2007, projecting that ringback tones will surpass $210 million in U.S. retail sales during calendar year 2008, up 50% from BMI’s 2007 market estimate of $140 million.

“The market for ringback tones has grown stronger than we originally forecasted last year,” said Richard Conlon, BMI Vice President, New Media & Strategic Development. “Its growth, coupled with the positive gains that streaming mobile media have made in 2008 alone, supports our bullish point of view on the growth of the mobile entertainment business. We see gains in mobile audio and mobile television style services in the coming years as well. As we forecasted last year, the ringtone market continues to decline as the novelty phase wears off and lower-priced substitutional products come to market.”

In addition, Streaming videos are predicted to be strong too. BMI has additionally predicted that ringtones themselves have had their day, and this market will decline, although still generating a healthy $510 million (projected) in FY08. Apparently this is equal to about a 7% drop on FY07.

BMI’s conclusions are based on it's extensive data gathering from over 200 million US Mobile customers' buying behaviour - whihc is believed to the the most comprehensive in the industry.

(source)