Japan had full-song phone downloads in 2004

Ringback · 2026-08-14

In December 2002, Japan's number-two mobile carrier started selling ringtones that could sing. On two handsets — Casio's A5302CA and Hitachi's A5303H, running on KDDI's au network — a storefront named Record Gaisha Chokuei, roughly “direct from the record companies,” offered about 500 songs as 15-to-30-second clips of the actual studio recording: the singer's voice, the band, the master tape, delivered over the air to the phone. A clip cost ¥85 to ¥105, plus ¥50 or ¥60 in packet charges — call it ¥150 all in, as the trade publication Japan Inc. itemized that month; about $1.25 at period exchange rates. The product category was called Chaku-uta · launched 2002 — “incoming-call song.” Everywhere else on earth, a ringtone was a MIDI file: note data, synthesized into polyphonic chirps by the handset, an approximation of a song with no recording in it. Japan had just put the recording itself on the phone bill.

The clip was a wedge, and the wedge went in fast. By the end of March 2004, KDDI's own annual report counted 70 million chaku-uta downloads and credited the service with driving au's subscriber growth. In July 2004 the count crossed 100 million — within days of Apple announcing that the iTunes Music Store · opened 2003 had itself just passed 100 million songs. Read that pairing the way the era should have: one company selling whole songs to computer owners in four countries, the other selling half-minute clips to phone owners in one, and the phone clips keeping pace. Then, on November 19, 2004, KDDI removed the qualifier. Its new service, Chaku-uta Full · launched 2004, sold the entire song — downloaded over the carrier's 3G network, straight to the handset, no computer involved. That is the title's claim, and it holds with room to spare: Japan had commercial full-song phone downloads in November 2004, and the first American carrier store to sell a full song over the air would not open for another eleven months.

Chaku-uta Full was the future, shipping, with a receipt

Chaku-uta Full's early arithmetic survives in KDDI's own press releases, which treated round-number milestones as news events. Three million downloads by March 1, 2005; five million by April 3; ten million by June 15 — less than seven months from launch. Twenty million followed on September 28, 2005, thirty million on December 28, and fifty million on May 20, 2006, by which point KDDI counted more than 150,000 songs for sale across some 80 compatible sites. For calibration: ten million full songs had gone to Japanese phones by mid-June 2005, while Motorola executives were still promising American reporters that the ROKR iTunes · launched 2005 phone — a device that would hold 100 songs, loaded from a computer, by cable — would ship that summer. The gap between the two announcements was not a technology gap. Japan was billing for the future while the United States was arguing about who would own it.

The economics were equally documented. The trade press that priced the 2002 clips at roughly ¥150 delivered had, by July 2004, a revenue figure to go with the download counts: about ¥10 billion in roughly eighteen months, per the Telecompaper news item on the 100-million milestone — some $90 million at period exchange rates, for ringtone clips, before the full-song service existed. What a Chaku-uta Full track cost at launch is not established — no primary source for the price has been located; period secondary accounts put full tracks in the ¥300–400 range, and the Balance block below records the gap. What is established is who was selling: the storefronts were run by Label Mobile, a joint venture the major Japanese record companies — Avex, Sony Music Entertainment and Victor among the founders — had formed in July 2001. Hold that fact; it turns out to be the whole explanation.

One archived post preserves the statistics the 2005 trade press passed around

The reason a reader lands on this page from a twenty-year-old link is a single blog post. In August 2005, the one-writer industry blog then publishing at this address relayed a set of Asian market statistics from a Variety article, via the ringtone-trade site Ringtonia. The post's own commentary on the numbers opened with a single word: “Wow.”

“Asia's Mobile Music Market” · The Mobile Music Blog · 2005-08-08 15:52 · category: Stats · archive capture

Four claims, as the archived post preserves them. South Korea's online and mobile music sales already exceeded its CD sales — a crossover no Western market would manage for years, and one later industry analyses date to 2003, making Korea the first music market on earth where digital outsold physical. Japan downloaded two billion polyphonic ringtones in 2004 — an average of almost 22 per mobile subscriber, a fresh ringtone roughly every two and a half weeks — a pace of pocket redecoration no other personalization business has matched. China Mobile counted 40 million subscribers to China Mobile ringback · 40M subs 2005 tones — songs played not to the phone's owner but to whoever called them. And Korean vendors expected to sell ten million MP3-capable handsets, five times the country's sales of standalone music players. A comment appended to the post added the freshest number of all: Apple's iTunes Music Store had opened in Japan on August 4, 2005, and sold its first million songs in four days.

The iTunes Japan number deserves its own paragraph, because it cuts both ways. Apple's press release put it plainly: one million songs in four days, more than 90 percent of them at ¥150 — and, in the release's own comparison, twice what all of Japan's other online music services together sell in a month. Read one way, that is Apple conquering Japan overnight. Read the other way — the way the mobile numbers force — it is a measure of how completely Japanese music buying had routed around the personal computer. The PC download market iTunes doubled was a rounding error; the phone market it did not touch was, at that moment, seven months into Chaku-uta Full and three years into chaku-uta. The Recording Industry Association of Japan's first full-year digital tally, for 2005, settled the proportions: ¥34.3 billion in digital music sales, of which ¥32.3 billion — 94 percent — moved through phones.

Why Japan? The rails, the tariff, and who owned the store

None of this was a mystery of national character. It was three pieces of infrastructure the West lacked, each with a date on it.

First, the billing rail. NTT DoCoMo · i-mode 1999 had launched i-mode, the first mass-market mobile internet platform, in February 1999, and its defining feature was not the browser but the invoice: content charges appeared on the monthly phone bill, and DoCoMo passed 91 percent of the money to the content provider, keeping a 9 percent billing commission — terms documented in the business-school case literature that studied the system with some awe. By the time chaku-uta launched on KDDI's rival EZweb platform, a Japanese teenager could buy a song with two clicks and no credit card, and the seller could collect most of the price. No Western carrier offered anything comparable.

Second, the tariff. In November 2003, KDDI introduced Japan's first flat-rate 3G data plan — EZ Flat, ¥4,200 a month, unlimited packets, on its new CDMA 1X WIN network rated at 2.4 megabits — and its 2004 annual report is explicit that the flat rate existed because per-packet pricing would have made rich content “prohibitively” expensive. A full-song download is a few megabytes; under metered packet pricing it would have cost more in transport than in music. Chaku-uta Full launched one year after the flat rate, on the network the flat rate was built for. The service was not an idea whose time had come; it was a product whose bandwidth had been paid for.

Third — and this is the fact that explains why the other two got used — the labels owned the store. Label Mobile was the record industry, selling to phones directly and pricing mobile as a primary channel, not a promotional afterthought. The contrast with the West could not be sharper. In the United States, carriers and labels spent 2005 fighting Apple and each other over whether an over-the-air song should cost $1.99, $2.50 or $3.00 — a fight this publication has walked case by case — and the fight itself kept the product hobbled. In Japan the fight could not happen, because the parties on both sides of the table were the same companies. Whether that harmony produced good prices for consumers is a separate question — ¥150 for thirty seconds was, per second, some of the most expensive recorded music ever sold — but it produced a market, years before anyone else had one.

At the peak, nine yen in every ten passed through a phone

The milestones kept compounding after the era's Western storyline moved on. Billboard reported that Label Mobile's Chaku-uta Full storefronts crossed 100 million downloads in May 2007 — about two and a half years after launch — and 200 million as of April 30, 2008, the second hundred million taking just eleven months, with about 120,000 songs on offer from some 50 labels. By then the RIAJ's statistics, the cleanest measurement this market ever got, described a digital music business unlike any other country's. For 2008: ¥90.5 billion in digital sales, 2.6 times the 2005 figure. Ninety percent of it, by value, moved through mobile phones against 10 percent over the internet. Full-length single-track downloads — the Chaku-uta Full category — earned ¥47.6 billion across 142 million downloads, which made whole songs sold to phones 53 percent of all Japanese digital music revenue by themselves. Clip mastertones added 182 million downloads, and ringback tones — the format China Mobile had scaled to 40 million subscribers — another 101 million. In the same year, the RIAJ's certification lists show, a ringtone clip could be certified at blockbuster-single scale: GReeeeN's “Kiseki” carries the association's “3 Million” mastertone certification.

Set the American carrier stores beside that ledger. The Sprint Music Store · opened 2005, the first US over-the-air full-song shop, opened October 31, 2005 — 346 days after Chaku-uta Full — at $2.50 a track. Verizon's V CAST Music · closed 2012 followed in January 2006 at $1.99 over the air. Both were, structurally, Chaku-uta Full with the ownership inverted: carrier stores licensing reluctant labels, at prices set against iTunes rather than with it, on networks whose data pricing punished the very downloads the stores sold. Neither ever published numbers in the same universe as Japan's, and both were dead or absorbed within seven years.

What the West took from the head start, and what the head start cost

What did the Western industry import from the most successful mobile music market on earth? For three crucial years — 2005, 2006, 2007 — approximately nothing. The formats crossed over piecemeal: mastertones replaced MIDI ringtones in the American charts, and ringback tones got US trials. But the structure — label-owned storefronts, single-digit billing commissions, flat-rate data, mobile as the primary channel — crossed over nowhere. European carriers drew the strangest available lesson, deciding the future was signing musicians directly; O2's two-tracks-a-week deal with half of Groove Armada, the previous article's subject, was that logic at full extension. The American answer was the carrier store fight already described. And when the West finally did get its mobile music revolution, in 2007, it arrived from a computer company, on a device with no over-the-air store at all, and made the entire question obsolete.

The head start had a cost on the home side too. Japan's handset industry built ever more elaborate phones for a domestic market whose billing rails and content economics existed nowhere else — a specialization later nicknamed Galapagos syndrome, after fauna perfectly evolved for one island. The chaku-uta economy was that island's apex ecosystem, and the RIAJ's own tables record what happened when the climate changed. Japanese digital music revenue peaked at ¥91.0 billion in 2009. By 2012 it was ¥54.3 billion, and the mobile (feature-phone) share had fallen from ¥79.3 billion to ¥34.8 billion — less than half its peak, three years after it. Single-track phone downloads dropped 43 percent in 2012 alone. The smartphone did not merely beat the keitai; it beat the entire commercial arrangement the keitai carried, and the world's most advanced mobile music market shrank faster than the CD business it had once embarrassed. KDDI switched off the CDMA 1X WIN network — the one built to carry Chaku-uta Full — on March 31, 2022.

The country that had the future first kept it longest and lost it fastest

Which returns this story to December 2002, and two Casio and Hitachi handsets playing half a minute of a real recording in a Tokyo phone shop. Nothing about that clip was a gimmick. It was the first working demonstration of the proposition the entire decade would be spent testing: that people will pay real money for real music delivered to the object in their pocket, if paying is easy and the catalogue is where they are. Japan proved it in 2002, scaled it in 2004, and peaked it in 2008 at nine yen in every ten of a ¥90 billion market. The West spent those years disputing the proposition, then accepted it all at once, on different hardware, through different companies, at a price Japan's system could not survive. Two billion ringtones in a single year taught one industry that the phone was a music store; the lesson took everywhere, eventually, except in the country that wrote it. The clip sang first. It just stopped ringing first, too.