Phone Users Prefer Gaming Over Music

The phone may not help save the music industry, as some may have hoped. According to the figures published by UK mobile network operator Orange, there were just as many game downloads (750,000 over a 3 month period) than tones, music tracks and music videos combined. Mark Mulligan over on his blog at Jupiter Research comments:

Sure there are examples of very successful mobile music offerings such as 3, but if mobile music handsets go the same way as dedicated MP3 players then the majority of what mobile users will do is listen to pre-existing music collections… games are simply a bigger deal with less direct competition: European mobile games revenues were nearly ten times higher in 2006 than OTA music and will still be sizably bigger in 2011.

Sonic the Hedgehog, Worms and Space Invaders (Anniversary Edition) the top three game downloads on the Orange network.