Music On The Cell Phone Not Such A big Deal

For the longest time, cell phone manufacturers and wireless carriers have been predicting that music on the cell phone would be the next big thing and save the music business.

Now comes a new study by Forester Research that finds that 9 out of 10 people in the U.S. never listen to music on their cell phones.

That's the key finding in a new study appropriately called The Future Of Music On Cell Phones.

Of course people don't want to listen to music on the phones. Until the iPhone there wasn't a device friendly enough for music, and unless the carriers had a piece of it (like Nokia), they weren't really interested unless you paid a premium for it.

Since the streaming music services that consumers are most interested like Pandora and Last.fm, don't expect the carriers to make it easy since those services eat up a lot of bandwidth without producing much revenue.

Then there's the issue of battery life. The main use of the cell phone is for talking, and if you eat up your battery with any other persistent use app like one for music, battery life is short, defeating the purpose of the phone in the first place. So don't expect the survey results to change much in the near future.