Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Wireless Announces Music ID Service
mindless4210 writes "AT&T Wireless announced today the release of their new Music ID Service from Musicphone. AT&T customers can identify songs by dialing '#ID' and holding their phones next to the music source. Daily Wireless did a full review of the new service, testing it in several environments against different genres of music. Now you can finally figure out the name of that song on the radio that you've been dying to know!"
As we celebrate mediocrity all the boys upstairs want to see
How much you'll pay for what you used to get for free
And there goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say
Hey, hey, hey
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
And there goes the last DJ
Tom Petty
Not if you don't know the name of it...
OK, fair enough... but we're talking relative value here: if the song itself is worth a dollar then how much is the NAME of the song worth? It just doesn't seem like a good value for my money.
What they need to do is offer 100 songs for $10 or something, or add it as a flat-fee monthly addition to your service. (or, dare I say, a free value-add to distinguish their cell phone service from others!) Obviously, nobody at AT&T has read Seth Godin's Free Prize Inside.
jrjBlog
Obviously this has to cater to the top 40 kinda crap that's be marketed as actual music to everyone today. what would really impress is being able to hold it up to some obscure jazz/electronic album and having the phone identify it. if you listen to any top 40 station for an hour, you can just as easily identify one of these songs as this phone can
It would be better if they bundled the pricing with an option to purchase the song as well. Chances are that if I want to know the name of the song, I would buy it as well. A buck for the name of the song and buying it becomes a value to me.
One thing tech people aren't good at is deciding how much to charge for a product. Most tech people will charge way to low for a product. I used to be that way, until I found out how much a house costs and how much a lawyer and doctors charge.
the "next call is free" policy, i would assume, is implemented to discourage people from abusing the system.. with music they KNOW the system can't identify. i.e. they still have to pay for a call to get their freebie.. if every call it misses on is instantly free, i am sure some drunken frat boys would be calling all night farting into the phone just to giggle at the results. or maybe not.
They ARE going to bundle the ability to buy the song, the album, or the ring tone of a song eventually. THAT is where the real revenue will come for them. As other people have noted a buck for the ID is expensive, but if they can get the people with the disposable income to use further services then they probably have a good revenue stream. Personally I would carry the cost of the ID service and do all the bundling, kind of use the ID feature as a loss leader to bring people into the ad stream for all the other services.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Wanna bet they're making the record companies pay as well?
I love classical, but it's a real bitch figuring out the song names. Hell, most of the time it's something like: "Concerto No. 432, Op. 5341: Andante con margarine" or something equally lame. If this service could help me out with that, it would be worth a buck to me.
I've listened to brilliant classical works, and then the announcer comes on and says (in his heavily-tranquilized drawl) a bunch of words I've never freaking heard before. No doubt it's the name of some obscure foreign composer and the foreign conductor and the foreign symphony that played the tune, which has a name derived from latin. Great. That fucking helps me a bunch.
Oh, and that's another thing; the songs can go on forever. If he plays 3 or 4 movements it can easily be a half hour. Don't get me wrong; I love the station (no commercials!), and I love classical music, but can this service really tell the difference between Handel and Mozart? And for that matter, can it tell me which movement, and who is conducting? Please excuse my skepticism, but I seriously fucking doubt it. The idea is great, and it's useful to me since my tastes range from pop to ultra-obscure, but does it work?
Electric Monkey Pants
What if you're listening to songs in a foreign language? or Opera? I doubt the service can identify them properly right now, but I once spent hours trying to identify Pagliacci's "Vesti La Giubba".
....
unless you also have a liking for the finer shades of techno
....
and you can forget about humming the tune in the record store :)
....
"It goes a little like this Boom DaDaDa Boom, Boom DaDaDa Boom, Boom DaDaDa Boom, Boom DaDaDa BoomBoom"
rather than quantifying exactly how it is abusing the system, let's assume that somehow in 100% of cases, it isn't.
but, now let's also pretend i suddenly own AT&T. i now own a giant corporation, and although i don't have my MBA, i have to assume it's standard business practice when owning a giant conglomerate to attempt to close every loophole where someone might attempt to use any of your resources to get anything for free, even if it's in the form of idle entertainment from calling and monkeying around with your musicID service.
anyway, that was my reasoning, and thus my assumption for making the next call free. discourages people from calling simply to make calls they know would instantly be free, and if repition makes people even slightly more comfortable with using a new service (and thus more likely to pay for it in the future), providing you a second free call might have an added side benifit.
i like candy.
actually, in retrospect, if it was my company (which it wouldnt be, because i'm not a shrewd business person haha), i would let people have free calls in order to encourage more use of the service.. but my guess is the uptight suits at ma-bell don't feel the same way.