Monday, October 29, 2007

Blackberry & Omnifone Team Up in Europe

Earlier this summer, before the iPhone hype, a little company called Omnifone announced there were working on a mobile-centric music subscription product called "MusicStation".


muSick in the Head: Mobile Music - All You Can Eat from MusicStation

If the service works as advertised, it seems pretty compelling. Basically, there is an incremental fee of 2 to 3 euros/week (8 - 12 euros/month) added to your mobile bill for the right to download and stream as much content from their 1.2 million track catalog as your heart desires (or your phone can handle). This includes the ability to stream one song while downloading another in the background. The weekly fees are inclusive of the data fees - where the higher subscription fees allow you to transfer the tracks that you downloaded to your phone back over to a PC. These tracks can *not* be burned to a CD, and it is unclear whether they can be synced to another mobile device.



The service works on "most" phones (symbian, java, 2.5g, 3g, etc), although Windows Mobile is conspicuosly missing from the list. The service has many "music 2.0" features including user playlist creation/sharing, charts, recommendations, member profiles, and the like. It also will send news, new release alerts and other related information on your favorite artists to your phone. Presumably, this is based on your listening history and doesn't require you to do anything special to receive this info besides just listening to your music.


Well, that list of phones now has extended to include RIM's Blackberry line (at least those running on Vodafone's network). It should be interesting to see what the uptake looks like for this feature - considering it is not cheap.

SHAMELESS PLUG:
Want to add social "music 2.0" features and discovery tools to your current mobile music experience without the need to subscribe to content? Check out the MyStrands Social Player (for Windows Mobile & Symbian).




UPDATE: Nokia has launched a new marketing campaign for their N-Series that features - you guessed it - MyStrands. Check it out (some screenshots below).



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