iPhone spurs Web traffic, if not music sales

By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) - While Apple did not introduce any significant iPhone upgrades at its annual Macworld convention, which ran January 14-18 in San Francisco, the iconic device still made waves.

Apple has sold more than 4 million iPhones since launch, according to leader Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote. But what's more interesting is what the people who bought it are doing with it.

In data provided to the New York Times, Google disclosed that it received more traffic from iPhones this Christmas than from any other mobile device, despite owning only 2 percent of the smart-phone market and less than 1 percent of the overall mobile-phone market. That means that while fewer people own iPhones, those who do possess the device use it to access the Internet much more than those with competing handsets.

What's not clear is whether the iPhone's slick design and simple user interface has proved useful for other functions -- such as buying music. Although iPhone users can purchase songs from iTunes when in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot, Apple declined to reveal how many have done so.

To date, downloading music to mobile phones has not proved a popular activity. According to a recent M:Metrics study, 20 percent of mobile users internationally listen to music on their mobile devices, but 83 percent of them are sideloading the music from their computers or from other devices rather than downloading it from a mobile music service.

NEW MODEL EMERGING?

That has music industry executives wondering whether the future of mobile music will more resemble the Web services model gaining traction on the Internet -- where fans stream music from multiple sources, including one another -- rather than the purchase-and-download model pursued to date.

In February, Apple will release a software development kit that third-party developers can use to write applications for the iPhone. To date, developers were limited to writing Web-based applications -- one of the reasons behind the iPhone's high rate of browser use compared with other devices.