Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones 294
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The new Sprint Music Store is the first legal music downloading service you can access right from a cellphone, and Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg gives high marks to the interface, download speed and playback quality. But he criticizes the 'stratospheric new price for the legal download of a single song: $2.50.' Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store. Mossberg responds, 'I believe something else is at work here: a lethal combination of two industries many consumers believe typically charge too much. One is the bumbling record industry, which has been seeking to raise prices in the fledgling legal downloading market even as it continues to bleed from free, illegal downloading. The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks.'"
Compared to ringtones, not so bad (Score:5, Interesting)
SonyEricsson will include iTunes (Score:5, Interesting)
The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks."
Should be The other is the U.S. cellphone carriers... since competition works and takes care of this in all other markets.
In Sweden downloadable music for cellphones is 9 cents (0.69 Swedish Crona) per song from ComvIQ [tele2.se].
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones. Everyone over here uses SonyEricssons excellent K750 [sonyericsson.com] or W800i [sonyericsson.com] , syncing them with iTunes and MacOSX using scripts like iTMW [fidisk.fi] or apps like Dreamsicle [kaisakura.com].
Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson [sonyericsson.com] will include iTunes [apple.com] in their cell phones during 2006. The demand is huge and they know they will have to do it, sooner or later. Nokia will also include iTunes as soon as they realize how Real sucks bigtime.
Re:SonyEricsson will include iTunes (Score:4, Interesting)
Second: No one inside the US should buy music for their phone. There are MP3 player phones out there (plus the ROKR). Of course, Sony is going to start selling Movies for cellphones; which continues to prove that the quantity of idiots in any country is always significantly greater than 0.
Third: SonyEricsson won't put iTunes on their phones. Other companies will, but not SonyEricsson. If Sony Music has any pull at all, they won't let it happen. Which is too bad. Sony is such a great company (if you don't count Sony Music and Sony Pictures).
Giving up on locked-down phones (Score:3, Interesting)
My Sidekick 2 has been quite useful to me, but the damn thing is locked down hard and T-Mobile rarely even updates the content catalog, while not even offering the same broad selection that they provide to every other phone they sell. SK2 users don't get T-Zones. We get a literal handful of tracks/message alerts, 90% of which are ghetto. By "ghetto" I mean for example, the following is virtually all of the alerts they offer:
"Baby Girl You Got"
"Attention All Pimps"
"Baby Mother"
"Message Dog"
"Check Yo Messages Cuzz"
"Massage Message"
"Only Pimps Get 40 Or More Messages"
"Paging The Pimp On Premesis"
"Remind Ya Playa"
"What Time Is It Playa"
"You Supposed To?"
"Pimp To Da Strip"
While the music section is 90% rap/r&b.
When it comes to applications, you can count on 3 new apps/games every few months.
I find it pretty insulting and rather pointless. It wouldn't be too hard for them to offer more, and more varied offerings, but they have resisted the considerable pressure to do so. If you are going to lock it down, at least give me something worth buying.
The Sidekick 2 is horribly out of date anyway. It's been almost a year and a half since the hardware was refreshed, and nothing is on the horizon. I don't really want to spent $400 on a replacement, but I'm not going to sign up for another year of being spoon-fed content on an obsolete phone. I know companies will charge whatever the market will bear, but I think that there is a large section of the market outsde of the "Teenagers and college students living off of Mom and Dad's wallet" that feels a bit neglected.
what? (Score:3, Interesting)
of course, since the nano came out, it'd probably be just better to tape the nano to the back of a normal cell phone that just makes phone calls. you probably wouldn't tell the size difference anyway. then you could have a real music player and a real phone instead of a compromise.
companies seem to hold this myth near and dear that having multiple devices is always inconvenient.
Why cell phones suck (Score:5, Interesting)
They pay this because cell phones are set up to be a closed platform, so that people can't transfer ring tones onto them. If people could just copy audio to them as easily as they do with a computer, there'd be no market -- there are *masses* of excellent, free, downloadable alert sounds for computers.
The cell phone providers don't want to be *data transfer providers*, as ISPs are -- you pay us $N, you get M amount of data each month, and your software can do whatever you want. That's a competitive market, and much less money is involved.
I'd love to see regulation out there that requires cell providers to allow *any* device (open platforms, maybe something running Linux, whatever) to connect to their network on a flat service rate, or metered based *only* on data provided. The current system is reminicent of the Bell hardwired telephone monopoly back before Bell was made to open up their phone system to any phone devices, as long as those devices didn't disrupt the network.
The fact that SMSes are more expensive than voice data on a typical US plan, for example, is absurd. This kind of screwball valuation only happens in the presence of a seriously non-free market. The incentive should be to use the loose-latency-requirements, low-bandwidth-required SMSes.
I'm one of a tiny handful of people that just won't buy a cell phone because of the fact that cells are magic black boxes run by a monopoly -- I want to be able to write (and download) my *own* alarm clock/scheduler/voicemail/etc stuff, without paying "application-level fees" to the cell provider.
Re:SonyEricsson will include iTunes (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Carl Bialik from the WSJ? (Score:4, Interesting)
These people make their money off drunk young people who find they blew hundreds of dollars on stupid inane crap when they were bored. It might not be criminal, but it's exploitative as hell.
Ah, Sprint (Score:4, Interesting)
I, however, don't see any need for such a service.
Re:Compared to ringtones, not so bad (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Why cell phones suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Expensive? Maybe, maybe not... (Score:2, Interesting)
Then you take into account what your network charges you to be online and downloading, and the ringtone becomes relatively cheap again. Know what? It's all way too expensive, and should be avoided until prices normalize (when the RIAA/MPAA gets their heads out of their collective arses).
Re:Compared to ringtones, not so bad (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Buy cell phones at a loss from companies like Sony, Qualcomm etc.
2. 'Incentivize' consumers to buy them for 'free' e.g., a $300 phone for $30 with a 3 yr contract.
3. ???
4. Profit!
See, when operators like Sprint, Verizon, etc buy them at a loss (step 1), they get a nice *big* deduction on their Taxes. Next, (step 2), who is to say that the original $300 prices is a real price any more? Whatever they can shake down from an unsuspecting consumer who has just been led to believe he's got such a great deal is well, pure profit. I believe it is generally accounted for as a 'service fee'. The contract is there to make you a true 'user' - strange how that term once referred to drug addicts but now everyone is a user...but I digress...
That is why operators hate to see you get unlocked gsm phones - that is why they will try to charge you by hook or crook for any and all services on that phone. I believe it Japan, they charge by the byte!
Proprietary cables (where standardized ones would do just fine), telling people they can't load anything on their phone without downloading it from the operator etc.. these are just tricks of the game.
At some point, all 'commodotized' services become a matter of who has how deep of pockets to rip the vast 'informed illiterate' masses.
point of view (Score:1, Interesting)
This is the kind of stuff that make me furious. What do they mean exactly by "justified?" (Assuming that was the actual word they used or the author's close proximate.) These guys don't even bother anymore with the usual, expected, hackneyed excuse relating to the "cost basis" for the service; instead, the ONLY reason is pure and simple arrogance. We'll charge $2.50 because we think the consumer is flat-out stupid, and the "justification" for that is these other widely acknowledged, classic consumer rip-offs that folks apparently fall for; the sort of unscrupulous profiteering behavior that we could only envy - until now. Comparing this to the launch of Apple's Music Store from the not-so-distant past, I can't believe how remarkably stupid these guys apparently are, not to mention the contempt they have for thier own customers
$2.50 a song that's even more restricted than Apple's Music Store and doesn't sound as good? Because blatantly ripping off consumers is the new game now at Sprint Headquarters? Fuck you Sprint. Seriously, Fuck You.
Re:Carl Bialik from the WSJ? (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I doubt it if anyone would miss it if all such "services" where to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow.
The fact that people can often blame themselves for getting scammed doesn't automatically imply that trying to scam people is OK. Yes, people who fall for the Nigeria scams have themselves to blame, this doesn't mean that the senders of those mails don't belong in jail.