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!"

Comments

The Last DJ.

[DAldredge]

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

Re:Good idea, too much money.

[jrj102]

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.

this can't possibly work for the stuff i listen to

[aberant]

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

Re:Good idea, too much money.

[Torgo's Pizza]

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.

Re:Good idea, too much money.

[adamgeek]

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.

Missing something

[Paladin144]

I think many of you are missing something, but it's also possible that you don't listen to a lot of obscure music. Sure, I listen to all the latest rock music, but I also like to listen to our local classical music channel here in MN, 99.5 FM.

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?