Back in July, Apple and Motorola announced plans to bring Apple’s iTunes music service to the Motorola’s mobile phones and smartphones. If a report by Forbes is correct, the two companies may showcase the fruits of their partnership sooner than expected—at January's MacWorld Expo.

While Apple is the number one provider of paid downloadable music, Motorola recently dropped to third place in the worldwide mobile phone market. An exclusive partnership with Apple could help the handset vendor better compete against number one Nokia and new number two Samsung.

Apple views its deal with Motorola as a potential boon. The company's CEO Steve Jobs said this summer, "The mobile phone market—with 1.5 billion subscribers expected worldwide by the end of 2004—is a phenomenal opportunity to get iTunes in the hands of even more music lovers around the world and we think Motorola is the ideal partner to kick this off."

Motorola and Apple said they plan to develop a new iTunes mobile music player to transfer songs to Motorola handsets. At the iTunes online music store, customers would be able to buy and share individual songs from a set list. The new service would also let users transfer songs from their computers to their Motorola phones with a USB port or Bluetooth wireless connection.

Jupiter Research expects the budding digital music industry to grow from $270 million this year to $1.7 billion in 2009.

Competing Platforms
Shortly after the Motorola/Apple announcement, Nokia unveiled its strategy for bringing music to its handsets. The mobile phone giant plans to create a music download service and player for its mobile phones and smartphones through a partnership with Loudeye

While Apple and iTunes offer the ring of name recognition for Motorola, Nokia's Loudeye agreement takes a music service for phones in a different direction. You see, unlike Apple, Loudeye is only the platform provider, not the retailer.

Consequently, Nokia's mobile operator clientele can use Loudeye's music platform to create brand-specific download music stores. That's a plus for Nokia, since wireless carriers prefer to present new services under their own banner.

Instead of promoting Apple, as Motorola's iTunes deal does, the mobile operators fronting a music download service from Nokia promote themselves. It is also hard to see how mobile operators can make money from customers downloading files to their PC and then syncing them to a Motorola phone without using a carrier's wireless network.

One advantage of Apple's iTunes platform is its AAC files. Unlike more common MP3 audio files and the Windows Media files currently supported by Loudeye, AAC is a part of the next generation MPEG 4 specification, making it digital rights management (DRM) friendly. By supporting DRM, AAC files deliver a degree of copy protection not found in competing standards. It is a format more to the liking of the content providers for any download music service, record companies.

Other recent developments in the handset music space include this week's deal between the Warner Music Group and Melodeo to let consumers download entire tracks from its music catalog directly to their phones.

AT&T Wireless' (now a part of Cingular Wireless) launched a service a couple of months back called the mMode Music Store. Built with Loudeye and Microsoft, the store lets you sample and purchase music from a mobile handset for the first time in the United States.