Seeking Truly Mobile Music

Last week Starbucks began testing a new service letting those with iTunes on their laptop, or carrying an iPhone, identify and download songs playing in the ubiquitous coffee bars.

In recent weeks we've heard Apple tout its new iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. We've seen Microsoft show off improvements to its Zune music player, talk up the player's ability to share music, and unveil Zune Social, a new community site. Cellular-service providers such as Sprint Nextel, Verizon Wireless (a Verizon/Vodafone joint venture) and AT&T continue to sell songs over the air and experiment with various music-related offerings. And what about services that recommend and stream music, from Pandora to Rhapsody?

There's a flurry of activity around a common theme: making digital music truly mobile, instead of contained in music players that get topped up at desktop PCs. But what will be the effect of this newfound musical mobility? Could it mark a substantive change in the digital-music experience? Or will wireless buying and sharing remain mere offshoots of the familiar PC/MP3 player ecosystem?

Currently, both buying and sharing are largely restricted to the PC. Music players with wireless capabilities – such as Sandisk's Sansa Connect -- are fairly new. Meanwhile, the cellular-service providers' efforts have largely been stillborn -- because until fairly recently they wanted to charge as much as $2.50 for a download, despite the fact that iTunes had made $1 a de facto standard. Why the high prices? A number of reasons, from the record industry's desperation for an alternative to the iTunes model to infrastructure costs that cut into already razor-thin margins on downloads. Wireless carriers were stuck with a bad choice between a low-margin business or a low-volume one.

The carriers have accepted 99-cent downloads and tried to escape the low-margin trap by expanding their musical offerings to include access to streaming music, ringtones and ringbacks, music videos, the ability to "sideload" digital music from PCs to phones and even services that "listen" to snippets of music and identify the song.

"Our strategy is to make mobile music as easy to use and as inexpensive as possible," says Aaron Radelet, a Sprint spokesman.

"We're trying to build up a set of services that have value to consumers while mobile," says Rob Hyatt, executive director of premium content for AT&T Mobility.

A hopeful sign: The carriers seem to understand that cellphones are no threat to displace the PC as the hub of the digital-music experience.

Source: online.wsj.com