Less than 2 percent of mobile users in the U.S. and western Europe used their phone to download music during the first quarter.
Industry tracker comScore said on Wednesday that although 24 percent listened to music on their phone, the vast majority loaded the tracks on their handset from music they already had on a computer.
Services like Nokia’s Comes With Music and advertising-funded start-up Spotify, which launched in late 2008, have tried to break into the digital music market dominated by Apple’s iTunes.
Nokia does not say exactly how many users it has for Comes With Music, which comes free with certain handsets and allows users to download millions of tunes to their phones or PC for a year and keep them afterwards.
Stockholm-based Spotify has over 7 million users. It has a free service for listeners who accept advertising, and paid-for services without ads.
In 2007, Rhapsody America was one of the first services to offer unlimited music packages in an attempt to rival iTunes.
ComScore’s data was gathered from users between the ages 13 and over in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States.
The numbers also reveal that 82 percent of users in five European countries used their phone for text messaging, 35 percent for applications like games, and 25 percent browsed the Web on their phone.
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