Napster president slams the ringtone rip-off

Napster president Brad Duea has criticised mobile operators that use the trend towards mobile music to exploit their customers.

Speaking at Mobile Content World, Duea said consumers should only be charged once for their music, whatever hardware they want to transfer it to. "Some operators want to force consumers to buy all their content again," he said. "That creates an island rather than an integrated experience."

Duea also called for operators to avoid charging their customers almost three times as much to download a song to a mobile phone as the same track costs to download to a PC. "We need to have a reasonable pricing model," he said.

While it's common for ringtone peddlers and mobile operators to charge £2.99 for a 30-second snippet of music while the same song is available as a download for music players at £0.79, the ringtone market doesn't appear to be suffering - and is predicted to be worth $4.9bn this year.

Duea sung the praises of subscription music services - coincidentally a much better earner for music companies than the standard pay-per-track model - saying: "Our research shows the concept of all-you-can-eat resonates very well with consumers... We really think the model should move to subscription."

Napster president Brad Duea today

However, the Napster head acknowledged such a model presents its own challenges, mostly financial. "We do need to spend more with regard to subscriptions on mobile," he said. "The technology investment is much greater."

With analysts already predicting a market shaping up to be worth $11bn by 2010, Duea is predicting this year will be the breakthrough for mobile music.

The only shadow on the burgeoning music market, according to the Napster boss, could be the record companies themselves.

"I think it's important the labels act as partners in driving this space. I think it would be very unfortunate if we repeated the mistakes of the internet," he said.

Napster recently signed an agreement with Ericsson to jointly create an iTunes-style service for mobiles, to debut next year.

Photo credit: Jo Best