Gavin Parry, general manager of sales and digital at Sony BMG, gave a talk on music and communities at the Mobile Content World Australasia 2007. Most people are familiar with the label’s attitude to digital content, but he game some idea of where Sony BMG sees mobile music going. Parry things the online model for music in communities will move to mobile—it will be largely promotional and free to the user via an ad-supported model. He also said that there are no mobile music communities at the moment, drawing a strong difference between community and storefront (as well you should).
Sony BMG thinks the industry needs to tread carefully in regards to commerce, with three main opportunities:
—suggestive, which is recommendations based on behaviour
—immediacy, giving people something to get or do at a gig
—exclusivity, fairly self-explanatory, something they can’t get anywhere else.
“If you put together immediacy and exclusivity some exciting things can happen,” said Parry.

He spent some time on how much more complex the music industry has become—it used to sell four types of product and now sells a lot more—and fleshed it out with an example of Justin Timberlake. There were 71 different pieces of content, a total of 14.5 million units sold, which drew $45 million in revenue of which $33 million came from CDs. “We worked very very hard to get that $12 million from digital content,” said Parry.

His talk included some music stats about Australia: Physical sales are dwon 20 percent but digital sales are up 38 percent, mostly driven by iTunes. on the plus side (for the mobile industry) 45 percent of Australian digital music is mobile.