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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.'"
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy. So maybe it'll work for the songs that you just HAVE to have right now, but otherwise why wouldn't you save a few dollars and just wait till you're home and get onto the iTunes store?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
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.
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones. Everyone over here uses SonyEricssons excellent K750 or W800i , syncing them with iTunes and MacOSX using scripts like iTMW or apps like Dreamsicle.
Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson will include iTunes 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.
The extortion I face when it comes time to add any content to my phone is the primary reason I'm dumping T-Mobile in January.
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.
nobody's going to use this service because the truth is that people don't want their music player inside of their cell phone. cell phones are more often than not tied to the service because of 2 year contracts, and they are disposable trash to most people, whereas people want to keep their MP3 players for a long time (they cost more than CD players, hold more music, so they should last longer)
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.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy.
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.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
This is exploitation of drunk people, plain and simple. Just like the 10c/joke services. No one in their right mind would pay for any of these services, and I strongly believe that no one in their right mind actually does.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
This story reminds me of why I very recently left Sprint for a less painful cell phone company. I lived in Nebraska when I got my first phone, and Sprint was the big kid on the block. However, the crippled phone, horrible customer service, and nickle-and-dime tactics made made me only stick with them because they were the best of a sad lot. After moving to Chicago last year, I dropped them and moved to T-Mobile. Wow was I impressed - the bluetooth features on my phone weren't crippled, they have an almost realistic developer community, they don't try to charge you to add your own pieces to the hardware you bought. I suppose Sprint will pick up some people from this for the same reason they got me (they are the only ones doing it right now), but I'm also sure somebody else will do something like this in a more realistic way soon enough (if people want it).
I, however, don't see any need for such a service.
Posted from the wireless couch.
Think about it for a second. People are spending insane amounts of money on what? Ringtones. They're paying at least $1.50 for a credit, and all they get is a MIDI copy. Spend two credits and yes, you can get the real audio sample, but it's still only a sample, not the whole song. That's around $3 for a twenty second clip if you're lucky. When you think about that for a moment, $2.50 doesn't really seem all that demonic.
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).
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Sprint says its higher price is justified by the convenience factor, the ability to buy a song on the go, when the impulse strikes. The company compares this to paying more than usual for milk at an all-night convenience store, or for hot dogs at a ballpark
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.
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.