[Dust2]

This thread is dead: The future of music consumption is with "cell phone bundle"?

The future of music consumption is with "cell phone bundle"?
Imagine paying $55 a month for a feature phone service or $65 a month for smartphone service that has:

unlimited music download
unlimited talk
unlimited text
unlimited data

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ente...bscribers.html

Cricket, the San Diego-based cellphone company operated by Leap Wireless International Inc., announced Sunday that its Muve Music service has exceeded half a million subscribers, making it one of the largest premium digital music services in the U.S.

Granted, Muve Music is not exactly the same as Spotify, Rhapsody, Slacker or any other number of premium on-demand digital music services out there. The most obvious difference is that Cricket's Muve is part of its cellular phone service rather than a distinct music offering.

For $55 to $65 a month, depending on the type of phone, customers get unlimited talk, text and Internet data, as well as all the song downloads they can cram into their phones (up to 3,000 tunes at a time, depending on the device's memory). The music service is "baked" into Cricket's monthly cellphone bill.

Muve Music: 100,000 paid subscribers (July 7th, 2011)
Muve Music: 200,000 paid subscribers (Sept 8th, 2011)
Muve Music: 300,000 paid subscribers (???? to be determined!)
Muve Music: 500,000 paid subscribers (January 8th, 2012)


Cricket is tiny (about 5 million subscribers) compare to the like of

Verizon: 107.7 mil subscribers
AT&T: 100.7 mil subscribers
Sprint: 53.3 mil subscribers
T-Mobile: 33.6 mil subscribers

Imagine if these giants join the bandwagon........

Which is WHY I'm very confident that the future of music consumption will be

1) through a smartphone
2) bundle with your monthly cellphone bill




Imagine tomorrow Verizon stated that it will give Verizon subscribers unlimited music downloads to their cellphone. It will also raise the monthly cellphone bill by $4. If you're paying $80 a month, another $4 is nothing. But you get all the music in the world anytime, anywhere.

[Dust2]

USA market:

Rhapsody (after its acquisition of Napster): 1 million paid subscribers
Muve Music: 500,000 paid subscribers
Spotify: 400,000 paid subscribers



In a very competitive industry, your competitors will copy your success in order to steal your customers as this Cnet.com article points out:

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-33370_1-573...g-chest-thump/

Still, if Cricket's growth spurt continues into 2012, I wouldn't be surprised to hear if other carriers begin nosing around for a behind-the-scenes partnership or investigate a similar all-in-one model.

Muve Music receives the highest satisfaction of any phones from Cricket. Why? Customers think they get to download music for FREE. It also keep churn down (churn = user switching to a different company).

Which mean, you will see other companies doing the same thing pretty soon.

[jomarr]

How is the quality of the music being downloaded there tho?

[Dust2]

Originally posted by jomarr

How is the quality of the music being downloaded there tho?

The sound quality? Not very noticeable compare to a MP3 player but MP3 is a bit better. However, I'm sure Cricket is working on devices with improved sound quality.

or music quality? Muve Music got songs from Sony, Univeral, Warner, EMI and indie. The music industry is hoping something like this will work for many years now.

[Dust2]

Look at this very possible scenario:

1) There are around 150 million USA smartphone users today mainly with Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-mobile
2) These users pay on average about $60 a month
3) Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-mobile signs a deal with Spotify/Rhapsody that give users unlimited music downloads to their mobile phone for an extra $4 a month. (Similar to how Cricket bundled with Muve Music).

150 million subscribers x $4 a month x 12 months = $7.2 billion USD


You can opt out if you want:

- $64 a month with unlimited music downloads
- $60 a month without

As more and more people use their smartphone as their music players, it's easy to see where the future of music consumption is headed.

[jomarr]

Originally posted by Dust2

The sound quality? Not very noticeable compare to a MP3 player but MP3 is a bit better. However, I'm sure Cricket is working on devices with improved sound quality.

or music quality? Muve Music got songs from Sony, Univeral, Warner, EMI and indie. The music industry is hoping something like this will work for many years now.

I mean bitrate. Is it 256/320 kbps or what? Because it sounds like a very good deal tbh.

[zach]

How do you think they are literally going to shut everyone down?

[reloaded]

Cricket sucks
Music subscriptions suck

[Dust2]

http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/news/...cut_on_orange/

Nokia’s debut Windows Phone teamed with free unlimited use of the Spotify-style music service Deezer is now £26 per month on the network. That includes monthly allowances of 200 minutes, unlimited texts and 750MB of mobile data.

Buyers also get to choose another free add-on with a selection that takes in Sky Sports Mobile TV channels, a games download area with free titles up for grabs and the Orange Book Club, which turns smartphones into de facto e-Readers with takers able to download one new book per month gratis.

The phone, which is estimated to have sold one million units since landing in the last quarter of 2011, is also home to an eight-megapixel camera, a 1.4GHz processor and 16GB of internal storage.

£26 per month to get

- unlimited music downloads
-200 minutes talk
-unlimited texts
-750MB of data

not a bad deal.

Expect more mobile carriers worldwide to include unlimited music downloads (whether it is Spotify, Rhapsody, Deezer, Rdio, MOG, or Muve music) into their monthly bundle plan.

[Dust2]

Originally posted by zach

How do you think they are literally going to shut everyone down?

They won't. But their success might inspire their competitors to do the same thing.

If Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile do the same thing, within a few months, 30-40 million Americans will have unlimited music downloads bundle on their smartphone service.

1st year: 40 million paid subscribers
2nd year: 50 million paid subscribers
3rd year: 60 million paid subscribers

etc...

compare that to how many Americans that use Itunes/Amazon MP3 to purchase music legally? 95% of mp3 are downloaded illegally.

[Beatfreak]

Or we can continue ripping music from YouTube.

[£100]

Verizon and AT&T likely wouldn't allow unlimited downloads as they've already capped monthly data usage.

[Dust2]

Originally posted by £100

Verizon and AT&T likely wouldn't allow unlimited downloads as they've already capped monthly data usage.

Easy way to get around that

For unlimited music downloads, you have

1) 200 MB each month from 3G/4G (this would get you around 50 songs or so)
2) unlimited data on wi-fi

It's a DOWNLOAD service (not streaming) so the data is only used once.

If you want the song right away, use that 200MB allowance. Otherwise, set it up so you can download songs when you are connected to wi-fi.