Mobile Downloading and Japan

It’s been a while since my last entry on our blog, my excuse – I spent the first two weeks of this year in Tokyo. So without further ado, some thought on mobile phone use over there and how they might tie in to some of the issues we’ve been looking at within the UK market… We’ve all by now heard that the use of 3G services is at a far more advanced stage in Japan than in the UK. And you don’t have to look too hard to see the signs of this when you’re actually there. Taking a typical train journey as an example, although it’s considered antisocial to actually talk on your phone when in transit, look around and you’ll see people doing all sorts of other things with their mobiles: Emailing, playing games, using 3G portal services. Talking to the locals gave me some interesting insight into the much less discussed flipside of this phenomenon – that PC use is less common in Japan than in the UK (even more so the US). So whereas the average Japanese consumer may turn to their mobile for travel or shopping information they would be less likely to turn to a PC for the same thing. This is established behaviour based on precedence. Mobile phones have become established as the source for information. Use of the WWW seems some way from the level it has reached here and may never be as popular as long. In many ways the opposite of the situation we are seeing in the UK. This fact is also reflected in the relative size of the online and mobile download markets in Japan. The mobile music download market has historically dwarfed that for PCs – by up to 50 times a few years ago. Japanese consumers have been used to using their mobiles as their access point to online services, including music downloads. The magnitude is now nearer to 10 times – and closing. It seems likely that this is in some part due to the rise of the iPod, almost as common a sight on Japanese trains as it is over here, giving consumers a new reason to download music onto their computers. There are some promising signs for the mobile network providers in the UK. Our most recent groups on mobile music suggest that consumers are coming to expect MP3 playback facilities on new mobiles. Alongside this (and despite continuing cynicism from some) they gradually seem to be coming round to the idea of using their mobiles as music players. Still though, in trying to kick start the mobile music download market here, providers need to work with the situation on the ground as it is, and that is one in which people are used to using PCs for downloading. Rather than trying to battle their online competitors head on, it may be that working alongside and complementing current behaviour holds deeper promise as a means of persuading UK consumers to start looking at their phones as a viable source for music downloads and online information. Encouraging a gradual shift to mobile downloading - through innovation or by utilising the strengths of the mobile medium - seems a far more likely prospect than expecting consumers to suddenly change what are established everyday habits.