Mobile Music Distribution: A Multichannel Approach

In contrast to what is happening in the Internet-based scenario, the music market in the mobile scenario is far from beingconsidered a large success. Several studies state that excessive downloading time and high cost are the main burdens.Motivated by the growth of social and mobile applications, in this paper we propose an approach that aims at reducing both the downloadingtime and the cost to get digital music when acquired in the mobile scenario. The proposed architecture exploits the usage ofpersonal communication technologies embedded in cellphones (e.g., Bluetooth and Wi-Fi) to couple the current distributionmodel (mainly based on 3G networks), so as to provide a multichannel distribution model where users are free to redistributedigitalmusic. The architecture includes a license-based securitymechanism that prevents unauthorized usage of digitalmusic, and makes use of an incentive mechanism to stimulate and reward the music distribution among customers. By analyzing pros and cons of the music distribution chain, results show that the proposed architecture might help in reducing both the downloading time and the cost to get digital music when acquired in the mobile scenario. Therefore, it might be helpful to the success of the mobile music scenario.