Is mobile music service a handset vendor’s business?

Apple with iTunes is selling music directly to the iPhone.

Nokia has their own music portal Ovi for music and games.

And we see Motorola acquiring companies to reinforce the music service it was offering in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Interestingly mobile operators are not taking an active role to own the music service, and seem to accept that they will be bit pipes for mobile multimedia. Not only that, but operators that get exclusivity for iPhone are reportedly paying Apple a 10% revenue sharing of the voice and data traffic generated by iPhone users.

As handset become more open and intelligent (think Android and Windows Mobile), Internet on-line stores will have it easy to sell songs to mobile terminals.

Except iTunes, which existed before iPhone, will handset vendor’s stores have any chance to compete in the online music business?

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