Editor's Corner

This week's 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona generated a staggering number of announcements, deals and opinions, and while it will no doubt take some time to sort through and make sense of them all, the one phrase that sticks out for me is "iPhone killer." It's an expression bandied about quite a lot lately, especially given that the iPhone itself is still months away from release. (Google it--when I did so Thursday night, it generated no fewer than 878,000 results.) Of the many "iPhone killers" launched at 3GSM, perhaps the most intriguing is Music Station, a new subscription service created by London-based Omnifone that offers consumers unlimited downloads from a catalog of over one million songs for £1.99 per week. Omnifone has already signed deals with 23 mobile operators in 40 countries, in large part because, unlike Apple's iTunes, Music Station promises compatibility with any existing music-capable handset.

Critics of Music Station cite its subscription model as its fatal flaw--the downloads disappear when the subscription comes to a halt, and conventional wisdom suggests that consumers want to own their music, not rent it. As a lifelong sucker for limited-edition packages, remastered reissues and the like, I've always placed a premium on content ownership, but as time goes by I'm not so sure: I'm currently in the midst of moving, and the physical demands of packing up my CD collection--not to mention all of my books, DVDs, comics and vinyl--makes me question the wisdom of maintaining so much pop culture ephemera in the first place. Of course, I'm not the demographic Music Station is targeting--that would be the ever-popular youth market, and in their world songs are far more important than albums and MP3s are much more valuable than CDs. So if albums as cohesive creative statements are passé, and if CDs as physical products are over, then where does ownership fit into the new content paradigm anyway?

The relative value and meaning of content ownership are elusive concepts at best. Consumers above a certain age expect to own music because that's how it's always been. But while it's only in recent years that DVD has made it possible for those same consumers to affordably assemble personal collections of favorite films and TV shows, none of them used to complain when buying movie tickets or paying cable bills that ownership of that content wasn't part of the deal. It's all a matter of perspective, informed by what you grow up knowing--and the reality is that, almost a decade removed from the release of the original Napster, an entire generation of listeners has grown up acquiring and listening to music in the form of compressed digital files. They share no nostalgic affinity for CDs, let alone vinyl--their record collections exist on PCs and handheld devices. It's much too early to say whether for them ownership is as antiquated a notion as Victrolas and shellac 78's, but also much too early to write off a service like Music Station just because it doesn't adhere to the music business economics we've always known. "iPhone killer?" Probably not. "Record collector killer"? Maybe. - Jason

P.S. In observance of Presidents' Day, FierceMobileContent will not publish on Monday, Feb. 19. See you on Tuesday.