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Recently, Moconews wrote about a Pacific Epoch interview with an interesting music downloading service from Duo Guo:
Apparently, in China’s smaller cities where mobile phones outnumber wired internet connections, there’s a flourishing black market where bootleggers are doing a brisk business selling mobile content to queues of people. Not only that, but people are actually paying the same amount of money for the pirated content, as what the legal version sells for.
DUO GUO, a recently launched Chinese mobile content retailer, which sells digital downloads such as games, music, and stock quotes in physical stores and staffed kiosks, is trying to offer itself up as the legitimate version of this process.
This idea might strike many Chinese as ridiculous because it is so easy to download free content through search websites like Baidu or Sogou. But people actually do pay to have songs, pictures, video, and games downloaded onto their phones. This practice is particularly common in smaller cities and rural areas, including my hometown of Wuhai, in Inner Mongolia.
The people I have observed in Wuhai who take advantage of these "paid pirated downloads" generally have little or no computer skills but do have mobile phones. A mobile phone is often a practical necessity for many people who have either dropped their fixed-line service or never had it in the first place. But the music, video, and video game applications are just as popular, and many people are willing to pay for higher-end multimedia phones.
Those offering these downloads are usually mobile phone vendors. They typically charge 5 RMB for a customer to download videos and pictures and as much as 10 RMB for music mp3s. (The songs are more popular, and customers seem willing to pay more). This fee covers one "session" but allows the customer to take as much content as his phone can hold.
If there were a fast, easy-to-used mobile data network with prices that were competitive with these "underground" downloads, I think many users in Wuhai and similar places across China would pay for the downloads--not in a few years, but right now. In this sense, rural users aren't that far behind their urban counterparts.
This black-market system also provides the outline of a pricing model for record companies, operators, and mobile content providers who are trying to figure out just what customers will pay for mobile downloads.
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