Music Services: Cingular, DoCoMo, MelOn and Napster
Posted Tue, 7 Nov 2006 12:06:49 EST by Ken Hyers
Last week Cingular came out with a big announcement about a new music offering for its mobile customers. The service was a grab-bag of different music services, including music subscription services from Yahoo, Napster, and eMusic, XM Radio Mobile, side-loading support for users own libraries including iTunes tracks, and an integrated music ID service. While no OTA full-track download is currently supported, it is coming, most likely by mid-year 2007.
Cingular has made a smart move by introducing music subscription services. In South Korea, SKT’s MelOn service lets users, for a little more than $5 per month, access a library of any of +700K songs. As long as users pay their monthly subscription fee, they can listen to as many of these songs on their phone as they want. If they drop the subscription, then the downloaded tracks are no longer playable. Apparently about 600K users subscribe to the service. Cingular’s subscription service may hit a similar vein of mobile subscribers who find the pay as you go model a lot more attractive then downloading tracks for $1 or $2 (or more).
Also noted:
Napster recently signed a deal to provide a music service to Japan’s DoCoMo. The deal is good for both the music service and the operator, since DoCoMo, the largest operator in
Napster’s been on a tear lately, signing up regional