Warner Music’s chief executive Edgar Bronfman said the mobile industry is not doing enough to exploit the vast potential of downloading music to handsets. Speaking at the 3GSM World Congress, Bronfman said the market for mobile music is being held back by ‘cumbersome’ systems for transferring songs to phones. ‘It’s expensive, complicated and slow and we need to do everything we can to change that,’ said Bronfman. “The average ringtone download session is two-and-a-half minutes and takes 20 clicks (to get to). If you could make that two or three clicks if you could make those 10 seconds, my goodness the amount of revenue that would unlock is extraordinary,” said Bronfman. Only 8.5 pct of mobiles with built-in MP3 players are actually used for playing music, despite the ‘voracious and increasing appetite for music’ on phones, according to chief executive.

Downloading music has so far proved frustrating for many mobile users, not least because of the digital rights management (DRM) software that prevents multiple copies of a track being played on different devices. Although Bronfman reiterated that Warner Music will keep DRM, he conceded that changes need to be made. ‘DRM and interoperability are not the same thing. There can’t be so much protection that we create a poor customer experience,’ he said. Bronfman said the ‘excitement’ surrounding Apple’s forthcoming iPhone has ‘raised the bar’ for handset makers, and is a ‘positive development’ for the mobile music market.