Apple boss Steve Jobs said earlier this month that iTunes' penetration has been weak. Jobs noted that only about 3 percent of songs on a typical iPod are bought on iTunes. The rest are either ripped from CDs and transferred into iPods, or illegitimately downloaded for free off file-sharing sites such as Kazaa or eDonkey.

    Speaking at the 3GSM World Congress mobile phone conference in Barcelona, Edgar Bronfman Jr, the Warner chairman and CEO, admitted that the mobile and music industries risk losing out on billions of dollars in profits because it is currently so difficult to download a track to a phone.

    Edgar Bronfman also unveiled an agreement with Orascom Telecom, of Egypt, which operates in countries including Algeria, Bangladesh, Italy, Pakistan, Tunisia and Egypt.

    Warner has also signed a deal with Telenor, of Norway, which owns operators in Europe and Asia, he added.

    Under the agreements, tracks from Warner, which like its competitors is battling diminishing CD sales, will be made available to more than 100 million mobile service subscribers.  

    He was, however, complimentary about Apple's forthcoming iPhone, saying that the rest of the handset industry will have to develop similarly attractive products to compete with it.

    "Before it has even hit the market the iPhone has effectively raised the bar of what people expect" from mobile music, he said.

    The mobile music market is forecast to be worth 9 billion U.S. dollars this year, rising to 32 billion dollars in 2010. But many mobile phone users find it hard, or believe it is prohibitively expensive to download music onto their phones. Only 8.5 percent of people who have music-enabled phones actually use them to download tracks.

    "The opportunity for mobile is huge, it's remarkable that we are selling as much music as we are on mobiles given how difficult it is to access on a mobile phone today. The average ringtone download session is two-and-a-half minutes and takes 20 clicks (to get to). If you could make that two or three clicks, if you could make that 10 seconds, my goodness the amount of revenue that would unlock is extraordinary," Edgar Bronfman said.

(Agencies)