Myxer Now Reaching 5.5 M Users

From The Online Reporter Edition # 575
Publication Period February 9 through 15, 2008

Myxer Now Reaching 5.5 M Users
Mobile content destination Myxer, the guys who last week jumped over the five million user mark, have again garnered some attention by reaching over 5.5 million users and 12 million downloads a month, and we got to talk to Myxer founder Myk Willis to try and figure out how Myxer did it and where it’s going.

The Foundation And The Facts
“It’s a great time to be in mobile,” said Willis, and his company is proving that. Myxer is an ad-supported pair of Web and mobile sites with mostly free content.
Myxer provides downloadable mobile ringtones, wallpapers and other content from music artist to users.
Myxer currently has over 5.5 million users who have downloaded 50.8 million pieces of content from a catalog of 308,711 items.
Myxer itself charges nothing but it does give artists the option to charge for content – artists must apply for the ability to charge for content. Myxer makes its money predominantly off of page and SMS-text ads and a tiny amount off of the content sold on its site. While Myxer is predominantly music, it also contains some comedy, sports and political content.
Myxer saw 13 million to 14 million downloads in January alone, averaging about 500,000 SMS messages everyday. Myxer has a little over 50% of its user-base as women, and in the market of teenage girls it sees a market penetration of about 2.5%. Myxer currently averages about 800,000 new users per month, with about three times that many unique visitors and attributes the vast majority of its growth to viral growth.

Myxer And Its Artists
The best place to start is the market of Myxer’s birth, independent music artists. These artists, who can reach the loving title MyxerIndies, were introduced into a market that was begging for content. Artists were allowed to and helped to make their content available to mobile devices and then have it provided originally for free. That’s the brilliance, right there.
Myxer took in artists who had no major label affiliation or had no label affiliation of any kind, and put their content into the market for free. Myxer didn’t do this with just 10 guys in the back of a van, it did this with many artists and it continues to do so, with about 13,000 bands.
According to its Web site, a MyxerIndie is a “special designation that we give to artist accounts who ask, and who provide us with some additional information like a website and an artist image.” When an artist becomes a MyxerIndie they can then choose to charge money for their mobile content, and MyxerTones allows each artist to specify the price for each item. One additional advantage is that it enables artists to create and maintain a fan list to reach out to the mobile phones of fans at any time.
With MyxerTags, artists and others can add tags to content on existing Web sites and MySpace music pages that link directly to content. A visitor simply clicks on the tag and then enters his phone number to receive the mobile content.
Artist that sell content get 30% of the retail price for every item sold. According to its Web site, “The rest goes to cover expenses such as PayPal or credit card transaction fees, SMS message delivery, carrier fees, my wife’s growing shoe collection, and the enormous pile of cash we have in the middle of the room here.” As you can probably tell, Myxer feels a little more laid back than most music and mobile distribution sites, probably another reason it’s seen such great success.

Myxer and The Fans
With thousands of artists and labels covered, Myxer users simply sign up for free and search until they find what they’re looking for. Of course, some users won’t be satisfied with the selection, so Myxer offers a remedy through MyxerTones.
With a free MyxerTones account, users can upload pictures and songs to be turned into wallpaper images and ringtones – continuing in its long-standing tradition, Myxer offers both of these services for free. After the content is made to the users liking, it can be sent to his mobile, the only charges coming from his carrier. This service supports WAV, WMA, MP3 and M4A files, but DRM is still a barrier, as the service cannot convert any files with any DRM encryption.

Myxer’s Myk Willis Looking At The Current Industry
To founder Myk Willis, Myxer really falls into the realm of three industries: music, mobile and the Internet. The music industry is an “ugly mess” that has such a distrust of its users, it “can’t be 100% for making the customer happy.” Mobile currently is just “a mess” as it is still stuck in the telecom mindset. The Internet is a beautiful industry that is different everyday. Willis is a fan of this because the openness of the platform allows “anyone with a valuable service [to] reach anyone in the world.”
The goal of Myxer and the goal of the whole industry should be to make “delivering mobile content and services as accessible as delivering it on the Internet.” There is great interest and profit to be had by anyone “aggressively looking to work to build a new economy.”
Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android made their way into the conversation as they always will for months to come, and Willis made an interesting observation: the mobile industry is currently closed standards – think your carriers and even the iPhone – and a move to an open network – think Android and the Open Mobile Alliance – will help everyone eventually but will disrupt the whole market when first introduced.
Willis praised the iPhone as a great “smack upside the head” to carriers by providing an amazing user-interface. The iPhone allows room for tons of content – even more after this week– and takes personalization to an extent never really seen before on mobile. Look for iPhone support in the build next week. On the same token, the iPhone is a closed device in a lot of ways.
Willis is “110% behind an effort for an open platform” for mobiles. The short-term effects of Android and other open systems will be disruptive as waves of devices with these platforms hit the market. Open platforms are great for consumer choice, but there is difficulty for content providers to hit all the phones.
Willis was genuinely excited about almost everything the market has the potential to do, especially when Myxer could be involved. The industry is expanding like crazy in every direction and Myxer has a product that reaches out to countless people. Though just about anyone that was seeing over 13 million downloads in the past month and sitting on a budding market would be over the moon.

The Future: Videos, The UK, and New Partners
The one thing surprisingly not yet mentioned was mobile video. Willis was honest about their approach to video, saying that video support had been available for a long time but only recently did Myxer begin pushing it. Once Myxer began to catalogue and organize its video collection, “The take-off has actually been crazy,” said Willis. Myxer has a service where on its homepage it promotes one piece of content, and recently when that content was a video, it was sent 450 times to mobile phones. Myxer is just getting into the swing of this, but as phones become more capable and data plans more liberal, watch for an explosion here.
Last month, Myxer made its way across the pond and launched its UK site: www.myxer.co.uk. The site and service are virtually the same, though the UK team will focus more on UK independent artists and labels as well as local advertisers. UK Managing Director Ian England said, “We created a business that leverages the best of the Internet and mobile to make digital content simple to share and access anywhere you are.” With the move to the UK, and eventual plans for the rest of Europe, Myxer is looking to make “anywhere you are” as many places as possible.
Willis offered up a taste of the coming expansion by saying there is a deal coming with Iris Distribution, a digital music distribution company for independent labels, saying Myxer will bring the artists and content from Iris to its user base. There were definite hints at other talks and possible deals coming soon, but Myxer and everyone else are on guard when it comes to deals because of a certain music site that went down in flames last week.
One interesting thing to note came from Willis towards the end of the interview: Nokia continually impresses him with how it tries “to get closer to the consumer.” Willis said that Nokia is definitely committed to the same ideal of a Web-style way of doing business. These comments did not seem like hints at a deal or clues to some puzzle to put together before this week’s publication. Willis seemed genuinely happy that other companies are moving towards giving consumers a free and open Internet-like experience on mobile devices.
Maybe that’s the future of the market, companies all working towards the same goal with the user’s experience being priority number one. Market trends are coming out of every possible place imaginable – that anyone with a great service can get it to anyone in the world, a thing Willis mentioned earlier – so maybe Myxer is poised to be the ad-supported source for mobile content. Maybe one day it’ll tackle the realm of MP3s.