Cingular's Free Music 86
PreacherTom writes "Music on one's mobile phone is nothing surprising: in fact, it is the entire principle of the upcoming iPhone. Downloading it for free is a different matter; both Verizon and Sprint's service directs to a proprietary store and charges up to $2.50 per song. Cingular plans on taking another route, having announced that they are gearing up to offer free music downloads to compatible phones. They hope to make up the difference through fees from the music subscription services for each new reference. The catch: a $15 per month fee."
Yippity fucking doo. (Score:2, Funny)
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And no, I didn't RTFA... just going by these replies.
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For $15 a month you can transfer all the music you like to your phone.
Or:
For $50 a month you can transfer all the data, including music, to your phone.
It's a hell of a good deal if all you're doing is snagging music with your data plan.
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Cingular will allow people to download music to compatible phones for free, although consumers will pay a monthly charge in the range of $15 for the ability to download songs from those services to a portable music player.
My reading of this is that they'll let you download the music to your phone for free, but to download to any other kind of device you'll have to pay $15/month.
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So will it be free to download as many songs as you like? If so, it may become worthwhile to buy the phone and service just to use as an audio player.
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It's NOT free... as in beer
Perhaps they meant open source (Score:2)
(No, I don't really believe that's what they meant.)
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FTA: "Right now, we're focused on getting people to view mobile music as something that's interesting and excitin
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hmmm, (Score:2, Redundant)
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"Cingular will allow people to download music to compatible phones for free, although consumers will pay a monthly charge in the range of $15 for the ability to download songs from those services to a portable music player. "Right now, we're focused on getting people to view mobile music as something that's i
so it's not free then? (Score:1, Funny)
last time i checked, "free" meant "no bucks a month".
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So in my case, to get this "free" service, I must pay around $50 a month.
Kind of like these advertisements going around saying stay with radio because it is free. It is not free. I paid for the radio, and as a consumer I indirectly paid for the advertising that funds the radio programming by purchasing goods advertised.
I am much happier paying $20/mo for two XM subscriptions and
Meh. (Score:1)
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That being said, I wished they focused more on what counts: phone service. I CAN PLAY DRM'D MP3'S BUT YOU WON'T GIVE ME MY 3G NETWORK!?
Wah, wah. They do focus on what counts - shareholder value. Their management apparently believes they can make a higher margin / total profit on charging for media services than providing a great 3G network
Fact is, you need to be willing to pay a lot more for 3G than you are. If you (as in all customers) were willing to pay more and increase the margin they project fo
"Free" (Score:2)
they didn't say what they meant by free (Score:3, Insightful)
Not Free as in Beer
Free as in '$15 a month'
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Out of curiosity, can anybody please explain why for the love of god cell phone data transfers and media services are so damn expensive? It seems a bit strange to me that I can get a ridiculous amount of transferring my voice over the air for free, yet it
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Better than 20/mo + $2/song or so
This is for the technologically inept (Score:2)
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Two words: Headphones. And plain.
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Unless, of course, you are referring to something like the Great Plains.
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Or "plane sucks" is an in-flight vacuum cleaner.
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Plane [reference.com]
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Actually, phones aren't portable music players by default, so their audio DACs are probably quite inferior compared to a portable player. A phone can't afford nice DACs and nice amps to complement them because they take space on the board, cost too much, and take too much power. Especially considering all the audio switching that goes on in a phone.
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Please. Do it properly (Score:1)
Re:Please. Do it properly - You too. (Score:2)
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Summary is horrible RTFA (Score:1)
How original (Score:2)
Speaking of Napster... how are they getting along?
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I thought I read rumors of them shutting down yet another time, but they were probably unfounded. They are still alive, but I wonder if they are viable. I would have tried their service but I had technological issues, wrong OS (XP only) and they had trouble with my ISP.
Where is the line... (Score:2)
...that defines "too much damn hassle and expense to listen to a couple songs while out and about?"
Honestly, this stand on one leg, confirm your DRM identity, rub stomach, pat head, open wallet wider and face Mecca in order to listen to a fricken' song is getting stoopid.
Note: "stoopid" is an order of magnitude worse that "stupid."
$15 a month? And people complain about Tivo fees.
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Meh. (Score:3, Funny)
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I remain skeptical (Score:2)
There is focus in the Nort
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Problem is people in the US are retarded and buy their service where ever Catherine Zeta Jones tells them.
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Amazon (Score:1)
Wha? (Score:2)
I guess that means I'm getting FREE cable, water, gas, electricity, car, house, etc.
I feel so FREE!
-ch
Weird Idea Newspeak (Score:2)
This whole article sux for saying "Free Music" when it's anything but. The editors should have put the $15/month fee in the first sentence, not the last one.
Yet another instance of (Score:2)
$15 a month... not for your phone. (Score:1)
So downloads to your phone are free, but if you want those songs on your MP3 player as well, you'll need to shell out $15 a month.
Hmmm (Score:1)
Then you go to their press release [mediaroom.com] and realize that they're not just talking about one monthly fee, but a whole bunch of monthly subscriptions. Napster for $14.95/mo, yahoo! for $11.99/mo, emusic [emusic.com]gives you 50 songs free (what kind of songs?), and XM satellite for $8.99 a mo. A f
If you've done data on Cingular.... (Score:2)
Cingular 2125 [amazon.com] Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone.
$20/month for unlimited data.
Orb [orb.com] at home on my media machine.
Shure i2c-t [shurestore.com] headset for listening to audio and taking calls.
Then you just stream the data to yourself. Sure, it's harder to actually buy a track, but I only have 256MB of memory on my phone. I'm not going to fill that up with downloaded music.
When dealing with any business, and most people... (Score:3, Informative)
Is too! (Score:2)
Which everybody thinks Heinlein invented because they first read about it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That's one of my favorite books, but that particular thing in it has always irritated me. Several reasons.
First, it's typical geekish language abuse. You take a elegant, memorable, easy-to-understand saying, "There is no free lunch," which Alistair Cooke once suggested should be America's motto, and you convert it into a klunky, unpronouncable, hard-to-remember acronym. But of course an acronym is mo
Use Orb (Score:2)
All I can say is: use Orb [orb.com].
The only disadvantage is that you need a XP machine at home. But then, you can stream all your music that you already have, no need to buy it again. And it's not just music, you can also stream video, tv, photo, .... And on any device, not just your Cingular phone. And it's really free, no monthly fees or things like that.
No way I'm going to pay Cingular for something so limited!
Free is quite vague in US (Score:1)
Everything is advertised as free here and it never is. There is always a fine print and as times go it becomes smaller and smaller and harder to find, read and understand. Such thing should be considered as false advertisement and there should be laws against it.
This service looks exactly like many other music subscription services out there just that it's on the phone. For many people it makes sense to have a subscription than to purchase songs but not necessary for everyone.
There are many people tha
It's all about access. (Score:1)
But what can you do once you (purchase) and download the song? Can you move it to another phone, when you upgrade or get a replacement? What is the storage capability of the phones that can justify the number of downloads that would justify the monthly cost? Offload to iPod or mp3 player, etc?
I'll buy into these s
seems wrong, but it's right (Score:1)
Having said that, I won't be opting in for this feature at any point in the near or distant future.
In addition, I do think this is a step up from the "2.50 / download" fee that the
Data bill (Score:1)
In other news... (Score:1)
Oh, and the catch is that it's not actually free, but still costs the same amount of money or maybe even more, but it's set up as a subscription.
How did this make it up on slashdot? For anyone who believes this nonsense - I have some "free" products I would like to "give" to you for $99.95/mo.
Will it sound good? (Score:2)