MUSIC: MOBILES TRY TO SAVE THE MUSIC INDUSTRY.

Mobile phone ringtones, although often poor quality, are already a fixture within the market. They allow mobile phone users to personalise their phone rings by downloading a music extract. Global sales figures for ringtones have already surpassed those of singles, once the kingpin of music distribution. Sign of the times: Japan now publishes an official Top-40, or 'tubes', for music telephony. The United Kingdom will do the same in the course of 2004. And a few months ago in Las Vegas, the rapper '50 Cent', received a platinum disc for a million downloads of his song 'In The Club'. "Mobiles can change the world the same way rock & roll changed it 50 years ago," predicts Ralph Simon.

The Japanese Takeshi Natsuno, head of the strategy department of NTT DoCoMo, a mobile phone operator, announced that the firm has 42 million subscribers, 39 million of which are in Japan. "The Japanese market is already taken, but there is everything left to play for in Europe," he said to his European competitors. Recipes for success in his view include: "a reasonable price" (around 1.5 dollars per download) and above all a user-friendly system.

Music telephony - which will also very soon allow the downloading of entire...