Execs Seek Music’s Next Killer App.

Music industry execs have been trying to read the tea leaves for the next killer music app for some time.  Legal P2P?  Subsriptions?  Ringtones? Downloads and streaming to cell phones?  At the recent Digital Music Forum in LA "video" seemed to be on everones lips…

According to Digital Music News, "…Wendy Nussbaum, senior director of eLabs at Universal Music, pointed to increased experimentation on various music video formats and distribution methods….the new possibilities include selling video downloads, streaming video content to mobile devices, and pushing the nascent video ringer. That could be a pre-cursor to an increasingly visual mobile world, with streaming video already hitting the marketplace through services like VCast from Verizon."

"But one mobile VP was less enthusiastic on the trend of streaming mobile videos, with Mike Gaumond of Motorola pointing to some thorny delivery issues. According to Gaumond, the economics and bandwidth are just too taxing, even within a 3G delivery network…"

"But mobile audio playback is still a big future market, with a rush of new devices now coming with mp3 capabilities. According to Gaumond, 750 million new phones will be shipped this year, and “a huge amount will have mp3 capabilities, while a subset will have the memory to store 1-4GB of content on them”.

Read the full Digital Music News article here.