Music and mobile is mighty match - now Madonna preloads Hard Candy on SonyEricsson phones

We see ever more innovation in the space of music and mobile phones coming together. We told you in our book Communities Dominate Brands of the first MP3 full-track music downloads that were introduced in South Korea when Ricky Martin pre-released selected full tracks in South Korea way back in 2003, and that Robbie Williams was the first musician to release a full album on an expandable memory chip for mobile phones in 2004. We also wrote of the music community experience migrating to mobile phones with for example the case study of the Twins Mobile music fan club and MVNO from Hong Kong.

The saga of mobile music continued and expanded. I wrote of more mobile phone convergence in my current book Digital Korea, which has a full chapter on mobile music and a case study of the industry-leading music service platform, Melon Music in South Korea. The book discusses several artists innovating further in the music and mobile space, such as Presidents of the USA releasing the first ever music video shot on cameraphones in 2005, Fedde Le Grand inviting fans to send in their own variants of the music video Put Your Hands Up (for Detroit) in 2006, and the Sugababes inviting fans to send in dance moves for the band to perform on stage in 2006. I even had the wonderful experience of someone reading my book, discovering himself in the book, and then contacting me to validate that my version of the story was indeed reported correctly as I wrote in "when your history catches up with you".

And then here at the Communities Dominate blog we have continued to celebrate musical innovations with mobile. We've had countless stories including the Fugees saying they will now use mobile as their only song testing platform, as P Diddy interacting with fans during live concerts, cool new services like Tonemine which allows ringtone mash-ups, and the amazing story of Mice Love Rice, the ability to turn free downloads of MP3 files on the internet into millions of dollars of revenues via Ringback (ie Waiting) tones in China.

So now Madge (or as some of my Finnish friends call her, Mato-Anna) ie Madonna, is jumping into the mobile music space. Her record label Warner Music has released Madonna's latest album, Hard Candy onto SonyEricsson's Walkman branded phones in 27 countries. Moco News reports that the album initially came as a coupon and then a bundled CD, now it is as pre-loaded music on the phone, either as full album with all tracks pre-loaded, or with 5 of the tracks from the album pre-loaded and the customer can buy to upgrade to the full album later. I should mention that this is not exclusive to SonyEricsson, there also is a Samsung F400 phone which comes with Hard Candy.

Yes, an "obvious" step by a major star in using mobile. We've seen something like this before, with Def Jam artists on SonyEricsson Walkman phones before, for example. But if Robbie Williams was almost there already four years ago, why did it take major artists this long? There are more than 500 million musicphones already in use ie about four times the installed base of iPod users.. Hello? Anybody awake there in music-land??

Well, it is anyway yet another in this twisting intertwined tale of music on phones, from the humble downloadable ringing tone that started it all ten years ago, to now the iPhone...