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Japan

Jul 8, 2005

Japan's mobile 'ring songs' market grows 600%

TOKYO - The market for chaku-uta, the use of actual songs recorded by artists for cellular phone ring tones, increased more than sevenfold to 20.1 billion yen (US$179 million) in 2004, according to the Mobile Contents Forum.

The sharp gain is attributed to the introduction of flat data transmission rates by the three major cell phone service companies - NTT DoCoMo Inc, KDDI Corp and Vodafone KK - as well as the spread of 3G (third-generation) cell phones. These factors made it easier to use Chaku-Uta, which entails relatively large file sizes.

"This trend is accelerating in 2005 as well, so cell phones will become an important sales channel for the music industry," predicts the industry group of cell phone content providers. Meanwhile, growth in the market for conventional ring tones is losing steam. This market grew just 6% to 116.7 billion yen in 2004, compared with about 15% the year before, according to MCF. This slowdown is largely expected to continue.

A report by Impress Corp, a publisher on information-technology-related topics, said the Chaku-Uta market roughly quadrupled to roughly 20 billion yen. It said conventional ring tones grew about 5% in 2004, slowing substantially from about 10% the previous year.

(Asia Pulse/Nikkei)

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