San Francisco - While one in ten U.S. mobile subscribers now own music-capable phones, and nearly 20% of new phones purchased in the third quarter of 2006 had integrated music players, consumers have thus far been reluctant to use over-the-air services to download songs to their phones, according to a report from market research firm Telephia.

Music-enabled phones available in the U.S. include the LG Chocolate, Motorola RAZR and Sony Ericsson Z525; such phones also allow users to download songs directly from a PC.

During the third quarter, a little over 2 million subscribers -- or about 8.5% of those with music-capable phones -- purchased songs via over-the-air services, although such services are not yet available on all major carriers.

"It is still early days in the market for OTA music purchasing and carriers are experimenting with pricing models and working to improve the user experience," said Telephia's Kevin Burden. "Clearly, the ability to facilitate impulse music purchasing will allow the wireless music stores to capture some portion of the larger digital music market -- the only question is how big a piece they will get."

Sprint launched the first over-the-air song download service in October 2005, and was joined by Verizon in January 2006.

"If we see the widely anticipated product launch announcement from Apple this week it could greatly accelerate adoption of music phones and OTA purchasing," added Burden, referring to widely reported speculation that Apple will introduce an iPod phone.

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