Slashdot Mirror
Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones
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.'"
I've never understood the deal with ringtones. Apart from the fact that they're usually obnoxiously irritating, on most modern phones you can just bluetooth any old MP3 to the handset and use it as a tone anyway, yet the ringtone market makes millions. I just don't get why people do it when they have a perfectly good CD collection they could use.
This might be the first in the US... but its miles from being the first available elsewhere in the world. Usually the US is a mobile backwater that lags the rest of the world by around 2 years or so, in this case its around about that mark again.
Japan and Europe have had legal download services for a significant amount of time either via 3rd parties or more recently directly, when it was being talked of as "what is next" in this market.
So like Sprint now do NFL, Europe has been doing Football (Soccer) goals for 3-4 years. TV on your mobile... yup got that... loads of crappy shit you never want... got that... and you'll be getting it soon.
Its expensive over in Europe too against iTunes et al, but that is down to the "convenience" factor (and normally lower quality) of the mobile downloads.
But "first"? Not by a long chalk.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
since competition works and takes care of this in all other markets.
The mobile providers are a cartel. They control the markets and do not allow fair and free competition. Cell phones are more expensive now then they were 5 years ago.
I just swiched my cell phone carrier after 5 years-- ATT/Cingular ended my old plan, and I wanted a new phone.
5 years ago, I paid a whopping $35 a month for Mobile service. This was the monthly service charge of $25, plus long distance surcharges, all taxes, additonal fees and 500 SMS messages. I use phone messaging as a pager service for my sysadmin job.
Today, for the same service and same number of minutes, I pay $45 a month. $30 for the plan, $10 a month in taxes and additional fees, and $5 for 500 SMS messages.
I searched for 3 months and couldn't find a better deal. The base charge is exactly the same dollar amount for the same number of minutes. Most of the increase is in the stupid fees-- "Long Distance Charge", "Verizon Wireless Surcharge", etc.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Carl Bialik has actually submitted quite a few articles to /. in the past.
English is easier said than done.
All I have to go on is my experience in the UK, but I'd have some trouble finding a current 'average' handset without bluetooth. Pretty much all Sony Ericssons and Motorolas have it, as do newer Nokias. Samsung is lagging a little, but it seems to be in all their new models. Basically anything that would come free with a standard contract will have bluetooth, and most of the Nokias seem to come with USB cables as standard now too.
...when dealing with monopolies.
Copyright creates one such monopoly. Since marginal cost is nil, marginal revenue alone controls pricing; as opposed to the efficient pricing based on the intersection supply and demand. This basically means that the prices will be whatever rich kids with the most disposable income will pay, and the rest of us can go to hell.
Since D.I.Y. production is ever more feasible, and the joy of creating music negates any costs to making music, it's obvious that the efficient, market clearing price for music is free.
And, as Dave Barry pointed out a week or so ago: You can't use the songs you purchase from Sprint(TM) as ringtones. Those you must purchase separately, for about $2.50. Yes, you can buy the same song twice for a single device!!! Nuts.
You miss the point. These are not ringtones. They are for phones that double up as music players.
Not to say your hypothesis is incorrect, simply misplaced.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
That's a fine plan, but the last phone I got was a SonyEriccson K700i from Vodafone. Vodafone had "improved" the interface to disable the ability to use an MP3 as a ringtone or alarm.
It seems this was done for my "protection" because if I ripped one of my own CDs to MP3 and used it as a ringtone then it might go off outdoors, causing an "unlicensed public performance".
Those quotes are from the guy at Vodafone customer complaints.
See the thing about phones in the US that you don't understand is that for the most part, they don't have SIM cards. I know it sounds crazy. So you can't just swap your service between phones, or your phone between services. The US doesn't have a single cellphone standard like GSM -- the providers all use different and incompatible (and mostly lousy) technologies. Only very recently is GSM service available (on frequencies nonstandard in the rest of the world) from one (or two?) providers.
I moved from the US to the UK, and while I hate a lot of things here (like the royal family), one thing that's clearly better is the technology environment, presumably due to better regulation. People in the US have no idea how convenient is the combination of a single cellular standard with things like pay-as-you-go contracts -- so everyone has backup phones and phones for houseguests, and can swap the handsets between services at will. Even upgrading your handset in the US is a hassle -- it involves a lot of waiting on hold to talk to someone at your carrier and waiting hours for the change to be recognized by the system, and they usually charge you a big fee for the privilege. DSL and digital terrestrial TV are similarly way more flexible, competitive, standardized and useful here than in the US.
"Playa" (PLAH-yah) == dry lakebed.
"Playa" (PLEY-yuh) == eye dialect for non-rhotic pronunciation of "player", slang for one who maintains multiple sexual relationships.
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones
Actually, I read that the number 2 legal (ie pay-for) digital music download service in the UK is Orange Mobile's music download service. I believe iTunes was #1. So not only to people outside the U.S. do this, but they apparently do it quite a lot. ImAgine a wireless download service being the second largest service in the UK.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
For what it's worth, I did an experiment once. I loaded my Smartphone with a bunch of music and played it all day long. The phone ran for 7 hours straight, and even then there was still enough battery left to make and receive calls. The big drain on cell phone batteries is the GSM/CDMA radio. The next biggest drain is the backlit display. After that, the CPU and audio don't draw much current.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
And what bias are you talking about? If you're saying that he is using /. to essentially advertise the WSJ, it might be a valid complaint, but it doesn't have anything to do with bias. Instead are you perhaps talking about the editors' bias in accepting his stories? He submits well-written stories which link to a reputable news source. Perhaps you don't think that the editors should accept stories whose primary source is a registration-only website, but again that has nothing do to with bias.
English is easier said than done.
Well, the 65 million GSM subscribers in the US (about 40% of the market) do have SIM cards. Of course, there are lots of locked phones floating around - but that's easy to resolve. And, of course, CDMA doesn't
The US doesn't have a single cellphone standard like GSM -- the providers all use different and incompatible (and mostly lousy) technologies. Only very recently is GSM service available (on frequencies nonstandard in the rest of the world) from one (or two?) providers.
Stop spreading shit. The US has GSM, and has had it since 1995. There are two national GSM providers (Cingular and T-Mobile) that, combined, serve more than 65 million GSM subscribers.
GSM 1900 and GSM 850 are standard GSM frequencies. 900MHz and 1800MHz are reserved for military communications in the US, so GSM has to run on the frequencies reserved for cellular communications (850MHz "Cellular" and 1900MHz "PCS"). GSM 850 and GSM 1900 are used throughout North America and in many other locations around the world.
I wouldn't call CDMA2000, the other major standard in the US, "Lousey". CDMA2000 is technically superior from a radio perspective; CDMA works in places that GSM just can't handle (like 50km from a cell site). CDMA2000 1x EV-DO also offers better latency (~200ms) and bandwidth (500-700kbps, real world) than EDGE or UMTS.
things like pay-as-you-go contracts
Have you heard of T-Mobile To Go, Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, Cingular Go Phone, Net10, or any of the many other pay-as-you-go providers in the US?
so everyone has backup phones and phones for houseguests, and can swap the handsets between services at will
Well, being a GSM subscriber, I could certainly do this - but why I would wnat to is beyond me. Everyone has their own phone, so why would you need phones for guests? And why would you need to swap services around? It's a pain in the ass to swap SIM cards around (usually need to pull out the battery).
Even upgrading your handset in the US is a hassle -- it involves a lot of waiting on hold to talk to someone at your carrier and waiting hours for the change to be recognized by the system, and they usually charge you a big fee for the privilege.
This is just plain wrong. T-Mo/Cingular are GSM, so you just move you SIM over. Verizon and Sprint allow you to change your phone using a text message, at a store, over the phone, or using a web system. It takes less than five minutes, and there isn't a fee. And the change happens immediately.
DSL and digital terrestrial TV are similarly way more flexible, competitive, standardized and useful here than in the US.
I'll take your word for DSL, because DSL does frankly suck in the US. But digital terrestrial TV? There are few places in the US where you cannot put up an antenna and recieve free broadcast digital television. Plus, there's cable, VDSL/FIOS (if your phone company offers it), and if you don't like that, there are two DBS providers (EchoStar and DirecTV).
So, let's summarize:
So, wow, was there anything that your long rant about the US got right?