From Alan Moore (no, not that Alan Moore) who runs Communities Dominate Brands:

http://communities_dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/07/on-seventh-mass.html

This is a long, rambling article but he drops a lot of gems.  Here’s the highlights.

Why mobile? There are seven reasons why mobile trumps the internet (or any of the previous five legacy mass media channels). I won’t go through them all here now, let me pick three that the internet cannot touch in its power.

First is reach. The internet reaches 1.3 billion people (of which an increasing proportion are already using their mobile phones as their primary - or often only - internet access device.). But there are over 3.5 billion mobile phone subscribers today. Every one of those mobile phone users can be reached with a basic SMS text message (and 74% of us are active users of SMS, so they will be able to respond to your communication). Out of the internet’s 1.3 billion users, only 1.2 billion are active users of email. So the most powerful communciation method on the internet - email - has a possible maximum reach today of 1.2 billion. If we take only the active users of SMS - remember the reach via mobile can reach essentially every mobile phone subscriber on the planet - the 74% of 3.5 billion - is 2.6 billion. So today - the active users of the most prevalent interactive media method - SMS text messaging - is over twice the size of the user base of email.

I have no idea what this implies for a WAR site but it does make me glad I’m getting used to Twitter and my own phone’s SMS as a communication interface.  I need to do some serious research on delivering music content to mobile platforms!

Also, here’s Moore’s riff on user data.  This is relevant to us because although we have numbers on the downloads from our free EPs, we have nothing else.  The numbers exist in a vacuum, we don’t know who/where or anything else about them.  However, I don’t know if the invasive and limited world of mobile internets is nescessarily “the solution.”

The internet promised a false hope of perfect audience information. It is far better than on TV, and still today, much can be done to improve the audience information gathering, but it is not the digital audience nirvana as promised by the gurus over a decade ago. The only reasonable way of knowing who is your customer every time - and thus collect meaningfully accurate information on that one user - is to force the customers to register to your service. This allows Amazon to build its recommendation engine, for example, and is a key to most modern services from Facebook on down. To try to collect accurate info on our behaviour as an audience.

The internet is far better than anything that went before it; but like the steam engines, is now about to be totally superceded by an inherently superior media technology, mobile.

On mobile - by design and by necessity - every individual user is always identified perfectly. By perfecty, I do not mean we know the name of every user - more than half of the world’s mobile phones are so-called prepaid (pay-as-you-go) accounts which typically do not need registration of the name of the user. The name is irrelevant. We know every user by a globally unique phone number. Doesn’t matter if it is Tomi Ahonen or Donald Duck or Mr X who is assigned to that phone number. We know the total composition of our audience, uniquely, completely, accurately, perfectly. Does this one phone number make repeated access to our mobile service site, and download our content. We know perfectly.

And yes yes yes, there are fudgy bits on the edges, it is not “engineering degree perfection” so please don’t jump on my words. I mean for ANY existing MEDIA company, this means as close to perfect info about our users, as is practical and usable. AMF ventures compared the three biggest media plafforms last year, and found that on TV only about 1% of audience data is captured. On the internet, a far better number is achieved, with 10% of the audience information is captured. This is night-and-day compared to TV, ten times better. Note it still leaves the vast majority of all internet users - and our audience - unknown. For every one identified, another nine go unidentified..

But then, on mobile, 90% of the audience data is captured. Wow. Now the world is turned upside-down. Not only is this nine times better than on the internet - and 90 times better than on TV - but it means a near-perfect picture of our audience. Out of every 10 audience members, wholly nine are accurately identfied, and only one out of ten is lost in the process.

Compared to ANY existing media, this is digital nirvana, the holy grail. If you are involved in media today, think about these two issues and understand - mobile reaches a FAR greater audience, and only on mobile can the audience be accurately identified.

http://dev.mobi/article/content-delivery-mobile-devices

In the past, delivering content to mobile devices has been a very tricky subject. Developers who came into the mobile world were usually confronted with a new and unknown paradigm, where very little information could be found on how to determine devices’ capabilities and to deliver content to them. It was something completely new, and it looked like this information was kept secretly as a precious treasure by those few who had been able to learn it. The aim of this article is to introduce practical examples on how to deliver content to Mobile Devices, making use of sample source code where possible.

In the past, developers had to rely on the very little information that was available on the Internet, and on their own tests via trial and error. Furthermore, the lack of standarisation among phone manufacturers made things even worse, since each of them supported different file formats, and different ways of downloading content, and so on…

As time went by, information slowly started becoming available, communities of Mobile Developers like the wmlprogramming mailing-list were created, and great utilities like WURFL and it’s API’s, WALL, and others came to save us.

Fortunately, each day more resources for Mobile Developers continue to appear. Great examples of this are dev.mobi and .mobi’s DeviceAtlas.

But despite this, we still often lack clear examples on how to achieve certain tasks, or solve particular problems.
So, in this article we present some practical examples on how to deliver content to Mobile Devices, and make use of sample source code where possible.

Last.fm press release:

Last.fm’s Free Music ‘Boosts Sales’; Unlimited Services ‘To Kick In By 2012’

By Robert Andrews - Wed 09 Apr 2008 09:21 AM PST

Last.fm claims its 12-week-old free, full-track music streams have resulted in 119 percent more CD and download sales through its Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN) click-through partnership. Some of that is attributable to an expected increase in site users following the new offering - but Last.fm also claims those who were members prior to the launch have been purchasing 66 percent more albums and tracks than beforehand, thanks to the full new previews. Figures for Last.fm’s 7Digital and iTunes affiliates weren’t disclosed and Last.fm wouldn’t supply the baseline figures.

Co-founder Martin Stiksel (via emailed release) offers the stats as evidence free music discovery can lead to dollars: “In just over two months, it’s become clear that people will buy CDs and downloads if they get access to the kind of service we offer.” That may help reassure some music execs that services like his, imeem and iLike can indeed aide sales.

Jupiter glumly noted digital sales have so far equalled only a third of the industry’s total lost revenue since 2004, and added illegal P2P sharing is still more than twice as popular as digital music buying. More cheerily, it repeated its earlier forecast that digital will offset physical losses by 2010.