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Cingular's Free Music

Posted by Zonk on Fri Nov 03, 2006 10:37 AM
from the beer-with-a-subscription-fee dept.
Media Music Communications Toys Technology
PreacherTom writes "Music on one's mobile phone is nothing surprising: in fact, it is the entire principle of the upcoming iPhone. Downloading it for free is a different matter; both Verizon and Sprint's service directs to a proprietary store and charges up to $2.50 per song. Cingular plans on taking another route, having announced that they are gearing up to offer free music downloads to compatible phones. They hope to make up the difference through fees from the music subscription services for each new reference. The catch: a $15 per month fee."
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PreacherTom writes "Prudential Equity Group analyst Jesse Tortora penned a note saying that Apple is readying a music phone — and a separate, combination video and music phone. He expects Apple to introduce the devices in January at Macworld, a conference for Mac enthusiasts where the company typically debuts new products. At least one of the phones will offer Wi-Fi connectivity and both will become available in the March quarter of 2007 ... but will anyone care?"
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  • Yippity fucking doo. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's free as long as you pay $180 per year. Sorry if I'm overly excited.
    • If I read TFA correctly, you pay for your music from Yahoo or Rhapsody, and Cingular doesn't charge you for your download. The $15/month, then, is a flat rate for the transmission service, not for the content.
      • So would that then mean that you not only have to pay the $15/mo for the "transmission" of it... but then also purchase the actual song from one of said stores? So isn't that TWICE as not-free as it's stated?

        And no, I didn't RTFA... just going by these replies.
        • Think about it this way.

          For $15 a month you can transfer all the music you like to your phone.

          Or:

          For $50 a month you can transfer all the data, including music, to your phone.

          It's a hell of a good deal if all you're doing is snagging music with your data plan.
      • From the article:

        Cingular will allow people to download music to compatible phones for free, although consumers will pay a monthly charge in the range of $15 for the ability to download songs from those services to a portable music player.

        My reading of this is that they'll let you download the music to your phone for free, but to download to any other kind of device you'll have to pay $15/month.
        • Good job sifting the chocolate from the dog shit. You might be right.

          So will it be free to download as many songs as you like? If so, it may become worthwhile to buy the phone and service just to use as an audio player.

  • hmmm, (Score:2, Redundant)

    by joe 155 (937621)
    Call me a purist but a $15/month isn't "free" - no matter how you try and spin it, free is $0 a month, forever...

  • so it's not free then? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    so actually it's not free, it's fifteen bucks a month.

    last time i checked, "free" meant "no bucks a month".
  • Last I heard it works in conjunction with Napster (so if you have Napster it works while mobile). So, it took the "mobile music library" idea Zone would ahve had and went with it. Golf clap where it's due. But phones have, at most, 2 Gigs of storage space (on external cards). So this really isn't effective for the mass music lovers with gigs of music. A nice little feature for anyone that uses Cingular and Napster. That being said, I wished they focused more on what counts: phone service. I CAN PLAY DRM'D

    • That being said, I wished they focused more on what counts: phone service. I CAN PLAY DRM'D MP3'S BUT YOU WON'T GIVE ME MY 3G NETWORK!?

      Wah, wah. They do focus on what counts - shareholder value. Their management apparently believes they can make a higher margin / total profit on charging for media services than providing a great 3G network

      Fact is, you need to be willing to pay a lot more for 3G than you are. If you (as in all customers) were willing to pay more and increase the margin they project fo

  • Write to me now for FREE information on how you can make money by sitting on your ass! Send me $10 and I'll tell you how...

  • they didn't say what they meant by free (Score:3, Insightful)

    by otacon (445694) on Friday November 03 2006, @10:47AM (#16703409) Homepage
    Not Free as in Freedom
    Not Free as in Beer
    Free as in '$15 a month'
    • Free as in Lunch?
    • You keep using that word. But I don't think it means what you think it means.
    • No kidding, talk about an extremely misleading Slashdot story title. Should be "Cingular's $15/mo Music". The only difference between Cingular's overpriced monthly music service and that of other providers monthly music service is the pricing structure.

      Out of curiosity, can anybody please explain why for the love of god cell phone data transfers and media services are so damn expensive? It seems a bit strange to me that I can get a ridiculous amount of transferring my voice over the air for free, yet it

    • If you look at their pricing for some of their extra services, I think you'll find that they currently charge $20/month for unlimited information service. Normally you're paying $.01 per Kb. So downloading a song would effectively screw your wallet. From what I understand they're going to lower the price for unlimited info service to 15/mo and allow free music downloads to your phone. Most likely you won't be able to pull the song off the phone, but, hey, that's a start.

      Better than 20/mo + $2/song or so

  • Or, in my case, cheap. My phone has bluetooth. As such, I can just transfer mp3s from my computer to my phone via bluetooth. Although the question arises: why would I do such a thing when the audio output just plane sucks on a phone (my phone at least)?
    • Although the question arises: why would I do such a thing when the audio output just plane sucks on a phone (my phone at least)?

      Two words: Headphones. And plain.
      • One word: plane

        Unless, of course, you are referring to something like the Great Plains. :D

      • Although the question arises: why would I do such a thing when the audio output just plane sucks on a phone (my phone at least)?

        Two words: Headphones. And plain.

        Actually, phones aren't portable music players by default, so their audio DACs are probably quite inferior compared to a portable player. A phone can't afford nice DACs and nice amps to complement them because they take space on the board, cost too much, and take too much power. Especially considering all the audio switching that goes on in a phone.

  • This is obviously some new definition of the word free with which I have been previously unfamiliar.

  • Cingular will allow people to download music to compatible phones for free, although consumers will pay a monthly charge in the range of $15 for the ability to download songs from those services to a portable music player.
  • Wow. Never have I seen that pricing scheme before. Especially not at Napster.

    Speaking of Napster... how are they getting along?
    • Speaking of Napster... how are they getting along?

      I thought I read rumors of them shutting down yet another time, but they were probably unfounded. They are still alive, but I wonder if they are viable. I would have tried their service but I had technological issues, wrong OS (XP only) and they had trouble with my ISP.

  • ...that defines "too much damn hassle and expense to listen to a couple songs while out and about?"

    Honestly, this stand on one leg, confirm your DRM identity, rub stomach, pat head, open wallet wider and face Mecca in order to listen to a fricken' song is getting stoopid.

    Note: "stoopid" is an order of magnitude worse that "stupid."

    $15 a month? And people complain about Tivo fees.

    • Note: "stoopid" is an order of magnitude worse that "stupid."
      Note: "that" is an order of magnitude worse than "than". T isn't anywhere near N, at least on my keyboard.

  • Meh. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Friday November 03 2006, @11:04AM (#16703621) Homepage Journal
    The real method to get free music on most mid-priced phones, is hold the phone up toward a cheap speaker and hit "record" on the voice memo feature. On the phone's crappy mono speaker, the end result will be indistinguishable from if you somehow imported lossless uncompressed PCM data from the studio masters.
    • You can't be serious. I really don't think anybody expects people to hold the phone up to their head and use the built-in speaker in order to listen to music.
        • You obviously live in the US. I've seen teenagers in the UK and Japan doing that.
          People in the US do it too, just not the smart ones. There's one guy on my bus home who seems to really love playing the same 5-second-long 50 Cent ringtone over and over again. If our bus ever stalls somewhere while trapping us inside somehow, he'll be the first one killed and eaten by savage commuters.
  • The US mobile phone market is crap. There is far too much vendor lock-in. The European markets are much more sophisticated than that in the US, because of the competition that was prevalent there. Hell, everyone I knew when I lived in the UK and Germany had had phones for years, and I left in 2001. Since arriving in North America I have yet to get a phone, becuae the plans are ridiculously restrictive and the services available are only now equivalent to what I had in Europe.

    There is focus in the Nort
    • Not surprised that mobile phones are bad in the US, especially as the pay phones are absolutely abysmal and are run by the same people (from personal experience on a recent trip to the US).
  • You really can't beat buying used cd's on Amazon and ripping them to your phone. I don't typically find a new artist every month that would justify paying 15$ a month for this service. I'd rather buy one cd I like for a possible 5$ a month used than pay this fee every month when I may not find a cd. Fact of the matter is that there's not too much good music out anymore and if there is, a lot of time it won't be on these music services initially. That's another viable point, what type of selection will they
  • For $15 per month, I can get FREE music?

    I guess that means I'm getting FREE cable, water, gas, electricity, car, house, etc.

    I feel so FREE!

    -ch
  • That is certainly a weird idea of "free". Is anybody really going to buy this newspeak?

    This whole article sux for saying "Free Music" when it's anything but. The editors should have put the $15/month fee in the first sentence, not the last one.

  • Nothing in life is gratis...
  • If you have tried data on Cingular without an unlimited plan, you know how un-free this could be. Personally, this is what I've stacked up to solve this problem.

    Cingular 2125 [amazon.com] Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone.
    $20/month for unlimited data.
    Orb [orb.com] at home on my media machine.
    Shure i2c-t [shurestore.com] headset for listening to audio and taking calls.

    Then you just stream the data to yourself. Sure, it's harder to actually buy a track, but I only have 256MB of memory on my phone. I'm not going to fill that up with downloaded music.

  • When dealing with any business, and most people... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Churla (936633) on Friday November 03 2006, @11:57AM (#16704469)
    The simple rule is TANSTAAFL [wikipedia.org]

    • Which everybody thinks Heinlein invented because they first read about it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That's one of my favorite books, but that particular thing in it has always irritated me. Several reasons.

      First, it's typical geekish language abuse. You take a elegant, memorable, easy-to-understand saying, "There is no free lunch," which Alistair Cooke once suggested should be America's motto, and you convert it into a klunky, unpronouncable, hard-to-remember acronym. But of course an acronym is mo

  • All I can say is: use Orb [orb.com].

    The only disadvantage is that you need a XP machine at home. But then, you can stream all your music that you already have, no need to buy it again. And it's not just music, you can also stream video, tv, photo, .... And on any device, not just your Cingular phone. And it's really free, no monthly fees or things like that.

    No way I'm going to pay Cingular for something so limited!

  • Will it sound good? Napster's quality was so bad that it gave me a headache!
    • My thoughts exactly...

      It's NOT free... as in beer
      • You know, free as in beer [bbc.co.uk]?


        (No, I don't really believe that's what they meant.)
      • It's free as in.... not ripping off the customer for the moment. They're charging customers once instead of twice. That's as close are you're going to get to free in the cell phone business. You can't extract money from a market that doesn't exist. Instead you lower the price to get people hooked and then drive up costs. It was exactly the same thing with downloadable ringtones and SMS messaging.

        FTA: "Right now, we're focused on getting people to view mobile music as something that's interesting and excitin
        • Still not FREE. Maybe AFFORDABLE or even a REALLY GOOD DEAL. However, it is certainly not FREE, so they should not use that word, IMNSHO. I LIKE CAPS, OMGWTFBBQ.

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