Vodafone unveils MusicStation

Vodafone's MusicStation service, which allows you to download music directly to your mobile handset, has gone live in the UK.

If you have one of the new handsets from Vodafone's Christmas 2007 range, then you'll be able to buy an unlimited amount of tracks from the service, which has a million tunes in its catalogue, for a subscription costing £1.99 per week.

Vodafone announced the service back in September, promising customers a "fundamental change" to the way they bought and listened to music on the go.

Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research, welcomed the new service but expressed some reservations.

"I’m not the world’s biggest fan of mobile music, but this offering definitely piques my interest. Mobile music needs to try to do something different than PC offerings if it is to have any chance of success," Mulligan said.

He warned that other companies attempting to follow Vodafone's lead with a subscription-based model needed to be conscious of making the deal seem worthwhile to customers.

"There is a big potential future for subscriptions, the only thing is that future probably involves making subscribers think they’re either getting the music for free or for close to free," Mulligan said.

Earlier this week Nokia announced its MusicStore service, where owners of certain mobile phones can download music to their handsets for 80p per track.

Users of the iPod Touch and the soon-to-be-launched iPhone can also download music directly to their devices using the iTunes Wi-Fi store application.

www.vodafone.co.uk
www.nokia.co.uk
www.apple.com/iphone
www.jupiterresearch.com

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