A new presentation by longtime Internet business guru Mary Meeker concludes that the U.S. consumer’s infatuation with smartphones will continue to have major implications for the music biz. According to Meeker’s analysis, music ranks as the fourth-most-important smartphone function, with an average of 13 daily play sessions leading to nearly 10% of total interactions. And those figures are expected to grow dramatically.
Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a former star equity analyst, used 2013 Tomi Ahonen Almanac figures in her latest PowerPoint presentation about Internet trends, which prominently featured coverage of mobile activity. Ahonen, a former Nokia executive, has written a dozen books on the mobile marketplace, and his first published forecast report offers projections for 2012-15 using the Almanac figures.
According to Meeker’s presentation based on the Almanac data, the companies dominating the mobile market have changed considerably as smartphone usage and revenue have grown. Less than a decade ago, in 2005, the Nokia and Linux operating systems combined held nearly 90% of the global market. Last year, however, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems together held a 91% share.
Meeker’s observations about how many times a day, and why, consumers check their smartphones, are especially intriguing. The average smartphone user looks at his or her device (or devices, in some cases) an astounding 144 times per day, according to Almanac data. Nearly 44% of these daily inquires involve the standard phone functions of making calls, leaving messages and checking the time.
Given that the size of the U.S. smartphone market averaged 138.5 million hardware owners from February to April, according to comScore, it’s estimated that Americans have 1.8 billion daily music interactions with their smartphones and 54 billion interactions in any given month.
Obviously, the leaders in mobile operating systems hold a great deal of power in digital entertainment. Assuming Android and iPhone owners interact with music at approximately the same rate on each of their devices, Android gets more than 936 million music interactions each day compared with Apple’s 706 million. From February to April, Android’s 52% share of the U.S. smartphone market topped the iPhone’s 39.2% share. Meanwhile, BlackBerry devices, used far less for entertainment than its larger rivals, had only a 5% share, while even less important Microsoft had just 3%.
The global figures are more impressive. An estimated 1.5 billion international consumers will own smartphones by the end of the year, according to research firm Informa, which translates into approximately 19 billion daily music interactions and 581 billion per month. With more people tying subscription services to their mobile phones, it’s likely that listening times and video viewing will also increase considerably, especially with potential new players like Apple’s upcoming iRadio and others entering the arena.