eMarketer has come out with a confident forecast for mobile music fortunes in Europe. It reckons retail revenue in the main five EU countries alone (UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) will balloon from $267 million to $1.4 billion by 2012. That’s in stark contrast to April’s Jupiter study, which found two thirds of US adults are not interested in any kind of mobile music at all.

And eMarketer’s assertion ad-supported mobile music (which barely exists as a category at all) will grow 37 times bigger - from $4.6 million last year to $170 million in 2012 - seems impressive, too. The report is titled Mobile Music: Ads to the Rescue - but both mobile ads and ad-supported music are paradigms that still haven’t been proved separately, let alone in tandem.

eMarketer did say: “The US is the world’s largest retail market for music. However, it lags behind parts of Europe for mobile infrastructure.” It said the emergence of unlimited music subscription deals would give the market a shot in the arm. Of the EU countries, the UK is leading the way, it said.

Come and learn more about mobile music at our EconMusic conference on September 23 at London’s Natural History Museum…

• Most Adults Don’t Want Mobile Music - Research