Abstract

The advances of electronic commerce had an tremendous impact on the media industry already. In this paper we take a closer look on the audio industry and summarize major considerations found in the relating media theoretical literature. This leads to the main topic under study: the much more significant impact mobile commerce might have. We discuss present and future technology options, which could offer new distribution mechanisms as well as significant changes in the underlying value chains. By presenting an existing prototype development for ordering music via air we afterwards even extend the discussion to the consideration of seeing mobiles of third generation networks as a download and distribution devices. From the discussion of optional features of the prototype we return to the general discussion of a relevant subset of open research questions.