Forget Madonna and her 278 mobile promotion deals for ‘Hard Candy’. The world’s biggest mobile music star is a 20-year-old R&B singer from Japan called Thelma Aoyama. Want proof? Her single ‘Sobaniirune’ has sold 3.4 million ringtones, two million full-track mobile downloads, and 1.6 million ringback tones. That’s seven million mobile downloads in total! The song’s apparently about her long-lost boyfriend – who’s presumably feeling a bit silly now, thinking about Thelma’s bulging bank balance. Interestingly, the song was released as a ringtone last December, BEFORE coming out as an actual single. That said, its sales were also boosted by its inclusion in a TV ad for Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo – presumably the equivalent in sales-bumping terms to being used for an Apple ad here in the West. Which makes Thelma the Japanese equivalent of Feist or the Ting Tings. Except richer.
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