Ring tones for mobile phones are out, complete songs are in! Over the last year Germans loaded 5.2 million songs down to their mobile phones which is 53% more than in the previous year. This song hype increased turnover of sellers by 30% to 8 million Euros, as was reported by the Association for Research on Consumption (GfK) which conducted a study on behalf of the German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM).
BITKOM expects the market for downloading of complete songs to mobile phone to grow in the future. This will be ensured by further development of technology and falling prices for songs. In the past year alone the average price per song downloaded fell by 5% to 1.42 Euros.
While complete songs become more and more popular, the business with conventional ring tones is shrinking according to BITKOM. Even though it still amounts to 52 million Euros and is therefore six times as big as the market for complete songs, turnover fell by 26% in the year 2007. In total Germans downloaded 23.2 million ring tones onto their mobile phones in the last year. In the year 2006 the number of ring tones downloaded had still amounted to 29.8 million. 