James Fee
10-06-2004, 12:00 AM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.bizreport.com/news/8122/' target='_blank'>http://www.bizreport.com/news/8122/</a><br /><br /></div>"<i>Until now, mobile music sales have centered on ringtones, the song snippets used to customize ringer and other sounds on mobile phones. At Tuesday's launch, mMode Music Store will offer roughly 750,000 tracks priced at 99 cents each. Full albums will start at $9.99. To buy songs on the service, an AT&T Wireless customer would use their phone's browser screen to search for tracks and, on some phones, listen to 30-second song samples. The mMode store will also sell ringtones. Purchases would be billed to users' monthly wireless phone bill, with customers downloading songs over the Internet from a Web site in the Windows Media Player format. The files and could then be burned onto CDs or transferred to portable digital players. "From our view, it really turns the mobile phone into kind of a remote control for buying music," said Sam Hall, AT&T Wireless' vice president of mMode Services in Redmond, Wash. "Our intent is to have the mobile phone become the discovery platform." The skeleton of the music store was developed by Loudeye Corp., which manages and distributes digital music and video.</i>"<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/large_nokia_6820.jpg" /><br /><br />Would you buy music from your mobile phone? At first I thought why the heck would anyone bother, but maybe AT&T is on to something. I guess the logical question is will we see MSN Music for Smartphones?