Two in five Melody Call users have cancelled
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of research conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of melody calls. This is the service (and a trademark of NTT DoCoMo) whereby when someone calls a phone, instead of getting a standard tone, instead music selected by the phone owner gets played, a sort of reverse ringtone for the caller instead of the callee.
Demographics
Between the 4th and 9th of April 2007 330 members of JR Tokai Express Research’s monitor group answered a private internet-based questionnaire. 47.3% of the sample was male, 21.8% in their twenties, 38.5% in their thirties, 20.3% in their forties, 14.2% in their fifties, and 5.2% in their sixties.
Currently only NTT DoCoMo and au by KDDI support this feature. The DoCoMo feature is named “Melody Call”, and au’s translates as “EZ Waiting Music”. SoftBank does not offer such a service. In March DoCoMo reported they attained over 10 million subscribers to the service, whereas au reported 1 million contracts. However, DoCoMo offers a feature package of Melody Call plus answer phone, call waiting and call forwarding for a price only 100 yen more expensive than the standard answer phone service, so perhaps their extremely high figures can be attributed to people buying the package and getting the Melody Call bundled rather than suggesting a huge desire for the feature alone. Indeed, with only 13.6% of users in this survey reporting that they are currently using the service I suspect there is a significant percentage of people who are not actually aware or have forgotton that they signed up to it.
I’ve personally never heard a melody call ring tone, but that’s probably because I don’t make many outgoing calls.
Survey results
Q1: Have you ever used a melody call service? (Sample size=330)
Yes, currently using 13.6% Yes, but cancelled (to SQ1) 9.1% No 77.3% (to SQ2) Q1SQ1: Why did you cancel the melody call service? (Sample size=30, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Not as entertaining as I hoped 11 36.7% Got bored of it 7 23.3% No songs I liked 7 23.3% Didn’t want to keep spending money on it 5 16.7% Changed mobile phones 2 6.7% Changed mobile service provider 1 3.3% Other 7 23.3% One of the popular “Other” reasons was dissatisfaction with the audio quality of the songs.
Q1SQ2: Why have you not used a melody call service? (Sample size=225, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Don’t feel it’s needed 95 42.2% Didn’t know about such a service 51 22.7% Don’t see the attraction 26 11.6% Fees are high 22 9.8% Service provider doesn’t support it 15 6.7% Seems difficult to configure 5 2.2% Doesn’t have my favourite songs available 4 1.8% Get none or very few incoming calls 2 0.9% Have a company mobile phone 1 0.4% No particular reason 21 9.3% Don’t have a mobile phone 7 3.1% Other 6 2.7%
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