Study of digital music behaviors

Findings from the latest edition of TEMPO, Ipsos Insight’s quarterly study of digital music behaviors since 2002, reveal that nearly one-quarter (23%) of American mobile phone owners have downloaded ringtones to their mobile phones. This translates into approximately 30 million Americans within the current U.S. population, and marks a dramatic increase over the past 12 months, when only 5% of mobile phone owners had downloaded ringtones. In contrast to PC-based music downloading, where file-sharing has siphoned potential users from fee-based services, mobile phone owners are much more likely to have paid for the ringtones they download, despite higher fees relative to buying a full song through a service such as Apple’s iTunes.
In the Spring 2005 wave of TEMPO, 78% of mobile phone owners had paid to download a ringtone, while 50% of PC-based downloaders report having paid. An important component in this emerging content space is the presence of an existing billing relationship with the consumer, thus providing a significant advantage over PC-based content delivery methods, where cumbersome registration and payment processes can discourage impulse purchases.