Mobile Choice Blog

Cliq mobile radio service to launch this week

There are already several ways to get music on your phone, from operators' mobile stores through to Vodafone's MusicStation subscription service, and the basic ability to sideload your own tunes onto your mobile. Now there's another, called Cliq, which lets digital radio listeners buy the songs they hear from their phones.

It involves installing an application on your handset, which will serve up a list of the five most recently played tracks on participating radio stations. So, when you hear something you like, you fire up the application, and then click to buy the song - which will cost £1.25, and be downloaded to your PC.

We wonder if it's worth paying such a premium on the price of each download, considering songs cost 79p on iTunes and other digital music services. Still, the Cliq application will be available from this week to download.

(via MocoNews)

Jamster launching music download service for Nokia XpressMusic phones

You might know Jamster as the home of the Crazy Frog, but there's more to the company musically than amphibians spouting gibberish over a dance beat. Thank goodness, is all we can say.

Jamster has just announced that its Jamster Music full-track download service will be made available on Nokia's 5310 and 5610 XpressMusic handsets, via the Download icon on their main menus. It's a subscription-based model, in which you pay £4.50 a week for six music downloads a week, choosing from 1.4 million available tracks.

It's slightly confusing though, what with Nokia having its own Music Store whose downloads work on both those handsets, as well as operators' own music stores. Still, if you're an XpressMusic handset owner who fancies downloading, at least you're spoilt for choice when it comes to stores.

(via Mobile Entertainment)

Five ways to get music on your mobile

It's a big week for mobile music, with the iPhone going on sale tomorrow, and some big announcements already from Sony Ericsson and Nokia. But what if you're a beginner to mobile music, wondering how to get songs onto your phone? Here's a quick guide to some starting points.

1. Sideload your own tunes
Most music-capable handsets now come with USB cables to connect to your computer, and software to make it easy to transfer songs onto the phones. Assuming your music collection is in a format that's playable by your phone (the three most common are MP3, WMA and AAC), you can just transfer songs over, and they'll be there waiting for you when you fire up your music application on the phone.

Nokia and Vodafone put differences aside for Ovi deal

Recently, Nokia announced its launch of 'Ovi', a suite of mobile services that would include music (the Nokia Music Store), games (the new N-Gage) and mapping/navigation. It was presented as a big change of strategy for the company, moving away from its hardware-focused roots.

However, some operators reacted with suspicion, worrying that Nokia was moving too much onto their turf in trying to provide services.

However, it seems Nokia is winning them round. At least, it's signed a deal with Vodafone to launch its Ovi-capable handsets in 2008, with much talk of how Ovi will be integrated with Vodafone's own games and music services on the Vodafone Live portal.

Mobile music shootout: Vodafone MusicStation v Nokia Music Store

It's a momentous day for mobile music in the UK, with the launch of two high-profile services letting you listen to tunes on the go. In the red corner, we have MusicStation, an unlimited subscription service being offered through Vodafone.

And in the blue corner, there's the Nokia Music Store, which works on phones and PCs, and is billed as an iTunes rival. We thought that, since they both launched today, we should compare and contrast the two, starting with...

MUSICSTATION

This is an unlimited subscription service, meaning you pay £1.99 a week on your mobile bill, and can then download as much music as you like from the million-plus tracks on offer. Omnifone, which runs the service for Vodafone, has signed deals with all four major labels as well as several indies, so chances are you'll find plenty of music you like.

It'll be a long time till we rock'n'roll (with Led Zeppelin mobile downloads)

Did you get tickets for the Led Zeppelin comeback gig next month in London? Well done if so, and bah humbug if not. And whichever category you fall into, we've got some bad news for you. It sounds like good news: Led Zeppelin are finally making their back catalogue available in digital form, allowing fans to buy albums or individual tracks from online stores.

But the bad news part is that US operator Verizon Wireless has signed an exclusive deal to sell mobile full-track downloads and ringtones. Bright sparks among you will have twigged that Verizon doesn't operate in the UK, which seemingly means no Led Zep for UK mobile users - at least until the exclusive runs out.

Admittedly, this isn't a dreadful state of affairs. If you want the band's songs on your phone, you can just rip the CDs. Meanwhile, the files sold through online stores may work on phones too, format permitting. But still, these kind of exclusives - when restricted to an operator in one country - are a great shame for fans in the rest of the world.

If mobile music really wants to rival iTunes, why not go ad-funded?

The name SpiralFrog won’t mean much to the average UK mobile user. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with Jamster. SpiralFrog is a US company that’s just launched a free music downloads service supported by advertising. You get songs from famous bands for free, and the advertisements shown while you download them pays for it.

That’s one trend. Now think about the way mobile companies - operators and handset manufacturers alike - are keen to make mobile music a rival for Apple’s iTunes. All the operators have their own dual-download services, for example, while Nokia is preparing to launch its Nokia Music Store.

Yet it’s clear that for the most part, these mobile music services are copying iTunes. Imagine if they took a lead out of SpiralFrog’s book instead...

How Vodafone's MusicStation subscription service could take on the iPhone

Mobile music is set to be the key battleground for the UK mobile operators this Christmas, and while Apple hasn't announced which operator will be selling the iPhone, you can bet that the ones that miss out will be pushing their own music phones and services hard.

Take Vodafone, which has just announced an exclusive deal with Omnifone to launch the latter's MusicStation subscription service in the UK this November. It will allow users to pay £1.99 a week for unlimited song downloads from a catalogue of more than a million tracks, with the ability to share playlists and songs with friends added into the mix.

Five reasons why the Nokia Music Store might struggle

Yesterday, we outlined the five reasons why Nokia's just-announced Music Store has a realistic hope of challenging Apple's iTunes Store for digital market dominance. In the interests of fairness, now it's time to take the glass-half-empty approach, and look at the key challenges faced by Nokia's new download service.

1. Apple is a mighty foe. When you're talking legal music downloads, Apple pretty much built the market with iTunes, and while its dominance isn't set in stone, it's a huge challenge for any other company to try and unseat it. Just as we're rightfully sceptical about any claims that the iPhone will make huge inroads into Nokia's market share in mobile, so we should be careful about wild claims that Nokia can do the same to Apple in digital music.

Five reasons why the Nokia Music Store CAN take on iTunes

Last week, Nokia finally announced its long-rumoured music downloads store, called logically enough the Nokia Music Store. You can read all the details over on the Mobile Choice website. Nokia was keen to portray the store as a competitor to Apple's iTunes Store. However, that's an ambitious claim, given Apple's dominance in the music downloads market.

We've put together five reasons why Nokia's ambitions aren't just bluster. Even if iTunes' position as top dog isn't under threat yet, Apple should be looking over its shoulder a bit nervously at its new mobile-focused competitor. Starting with...

1. The rise of mobile music. Nokia already claims that it's the world's biggest manufacturer of MP3 players, thanks to the tens of millions of music-capable handsets it shipped last year. Although it's a bit early to write iPods off as dead dodos, there's a definite shift towards people listening to music on their phones, which the Nokia Music Store aims to capitalise on.