Sprint Offering Full-Song Downloads
By Keith Reed, The Boston Globe
Nov. 1–Sprint Nextel Corp. yesterday became the first major wireless carrier in the United States to offer full-song music downloads directly to cellphones.
In a move certain to be followed by competitors, Sprint opened its “store,” from which subscribers carrying one of its phones can download music at a hefty cost of $2.50 per song. That’s about two-and-a-half times more than the 99 cents charged by music-download leader Apple Computer Inc. at its iTunes music store, and a sign that wireless companies believe customers will pay much more for downloads than they currently do.
Wireless companies are turning increasingly to entertainment to raise revenue as their margins on selling voice service shrink.
Sprint’s music downloads will come via a new high-speed wireless network over which the company will also offer live television, video clips, and other content to customers who pay a premium to access the services.
“This is Sprint transforming itself into an entertainment provider, helping to connect people with their entertainment,” said Sprint spokesman Paul Baltzer. “We believe people will put a premium on convenience if the service is relevant and valued.”
It could be some time, though, before it’s clear whether consumers will find downloading music to their phones a viable alternative to using one of Apple’s popular iPods or a similar media player.
Sprint and its top competitors, Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless, already offer phones capable of storing and playing music, whether inside the phones themselves or on removable flash-memory cards. All three companies have also made big forays into the ringtone market, a service in which users pay as much as $2 apiece for snippets of songs that can be used in place of a regular ringer.
US ringtone sales hit $245 million in 2004 and are expected to rise to $500 million this year, according to Broadcast Music Inc., a trade group.
Whether wireless companies can duplicate that success with full songs will depend on whether they can create a model that consumers find compelling, said Dominic Endicott, global head of the wireless practice at Adventis, a Boston consulting firm.
“All the major carriers will need to have a music service to stay on the leading edge,” he said.
But there are questions about what those services need to look like to draw customers, Endicott said:
Will the downloads be priced right? How long does it take to download a song? And what happens if a call comes through while you’re downloading?
Already, one entry into the market has gotten a lukewarm reception. The much-anticipated Motorola Rokr phone, which runs on Cingular’s wireless network and includes Apple’s popular iTunes software, was largely panned by reviewers because of its 100-song storage limit, far lower than the thousands of songs that regular iPod users are used to carrying.
The first two phones that will work with Sprint’s new network — Samsung’s $399.99 A940 and Sanyo’s $379.99 MM-9000 — will come with a much smaller capacity: Their standard 16 megabytes of flash memory will only hold about 15 to 20 songs, although they can be upgraded with cards that have a larger capacity.
“We offered that as a starting point and then people can buy other cards to get to where they want to be in terms of more songs,” said John Redman, Sprint’s New England spokesman.
Users should have access to a large library of songs, as Sprint’s has deals to offer music from four of the major labels — EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group.
Baltzer said downloads should generally take between 30 and 40 seconds, provided the phone is being used in an area already being covered by the new high-speed network.
That coverage though, could be spotty until Sprint finishes turning on the network nationwide. Downloading elsewhere will be possible, but slower.
The iTunes music store, the largest download service, has a library of more than 2 million songs.
Users will actually get two versions of each song they download: one to be stored on their phones and one in the popular Windows Media Audio, or WMA, format, for storage on a computer or other device.
The WMA files can also be burned onto compact discs an unlimited number of times by themselves, or up to seven times as part of a playlist of songs; the last limitation can be overcome if the order of songs in a playlist is changed.
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