You'd expect to see Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a wireless industry trade event, but Quincy Jones or Master P? This year's CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show brought out some of the music industry's biggest luminaries, signaling the changing nature of the wireless industry as it evolves from providing voice plans to becoming the newest media distribution platform.

Legendary producer Quincy Jones was at a preshow event, Mobile Entertainment Live, discussing the evolution of music to digital formats and its spread to all devices. (For Jones, technology has been a part of music for far longer than MP3 — it started with the Fender electric bass in 1953.) But fellow producer and hip-hop artist Percy “Master P” Miller was at CTIA purely for business.

Miller has just been appointed president of UdubMusic, a new digital music label with the aim of focusing on the phone as a digital distribution mechanism. UdubMusic is an offshoot of UrbanWorld Wireless, a ringtone provider for numerous hip-hop acts. Miller said, however, that the ringtone business — once the stalwart of wireless music — is losing its appeal; yet at the same time, new phone capabilities and faster networks are allowing music labels to distribute full-length songs and video.

Music downloads over the air are nothing new, but they are still a supplemental business to music downloads over the Internet, accounting for a fraction of total digital music consumption. But Miller said that the industry has barely tapped the potential of wireless music. The Internet download model assumes access to a PC, a piece of hardware that a huge proportion of the music-consuming youth segment doesn't have. Everyone, though, has a phone, Miller said.

Creating a digital label has one other advantage, Miller added: It's a way to bypass the usual process of the music industry, which requires millions in investment for distributing and promoting new albums. UdubMusic will work with much smaller budgets, allowing unknown artists an outlet they couldn't get from a major record label, he said.

“We want to create entrepreneurs who can put their own music out there,” Miller said. “We're open to new ideas right now. We're just looking to make some hit records.”

Miller isn't the only one looking at the potential of wireless distribution for new artists. White-label music download platform provider Groove Mobile is offering the first off-deck music portal for full-track downloads, offering music from independent label aggregator The Orchard. The project is starting out small. Groove Mobile is distributing a single digital rights management-free track — “Can't Hold Back” from hip-hop artist Aceyalone — via short code for $2, with the back-end billing to the carrier handled by Bango. But Adam Sexton, chief marketing officer for Groove Mobile, said the company plans to launch a full wireless application protocol portal with access to millions of songs.

That model seems to run counter to the strategy of wireless carriers such as Sprint and Verizon Wireless, which are promoting their own music services. But operators realize that customers don't want to buy all of their music from a single source, Sexton said. Vodafone in the U.K. is already supporting on-deck and off-deck music downloads. The service's biggest potential isn't in its music portal but as an alternative discovery mechanism for wireless music. Customers may go to carrier stores to browse music or search out a specific track, but most customers will come to the Groove Mobile portal by short code after seeing a specific promotion, such as a concert poster or radio ad, Sexton said.

“We think this will be a call to action to the carriers,” Sexton said. “We want them to understand that this is easy money with no overhead.”