Fed up with Vodafone and Nokia getting all the attention about their new music services like MusicStation and Music Store, 3’s launched its own unlimited music service.
3 does offer music downloads through MusicStore, but its Non Stop Music now offers 24-hour music streaming to your handset for a mere 49p a day. Unlike the above services, this is more of a mobile radio service but one that offers a dip-in-and-out user experience.
There are eight genre-based music streams (or ‘stations’) and each plays tracks on a four-hour loop. You can switch between stations at any time and new music will be updated every week.
It sounds like a neat idea but with only four-hour loops it could get a little repetitive very quickly if you listen to it a lot.
This month has seen the launch of two mobile music services, competing for the ears of the mobile-equipped music fan.
Nokia’s Music Store and Vodafone’s MusicStation both offer DRM-laden music downloads, on a per-track or per-album basis (Music Store) or by paying a fixed monthly fee for unlimited access to their music libraries (Both services).
The two services appear quite similar at first glance - how do they compare?
Continue reading ‘Hands on: Vodafone MusicStation versus Nokia Music Store’
Vodafone is set to do a double team on Nokia and Apple with Omnifone in order to enter the increasingly competitive mobile music space. The exclusive deal will mean that Vodafone users will have unlimited download access to over 1 million tracks contained in Omnifone’s MusicStation service for a measly £1.99 per month.
The service will be available to both existing 2.5G and 3G handsets meaning that a huge installed base of music hungry mobile users are already out there just waiting for the switch to be flicked.
Clearly kindred spirits because the two companies spell “phone” the same way (fone), the pairing seems to be a timely competitive move to tackle both the iPhone’s iTunes service and Nokia’s new music service.
Considering the iPhone is almost certainly not going to appear in Vodafone stores, whereas Nokia handsets will, it will be interesting to see how this battle pans out.
(Via Reuters)
