“Sony’s music service is moving into Apple’s neighborhood. Sony’s subscription-based streaming music service, Music Unlimited, will be available as an app for Apple iPhones and iPads sometime this quarter,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Sony’s decision to offer the service, touted as the Japanese company’s answer to Apple’s iTunes, on iOS devices speaks to Apple’s presence in the all-important smartphone and tablet markets as well as Sony’s willingness to do whatever it takes to expand the reach of its content services,” Wakabayashi reports. “The system is two-tier with basic subscribers paying $3.99 to be able stream music from their own library or the service’s designated channels across a wide range of devices, premium subscribers pay $9.99 to stream from any of 15 million songs in the library.”
akabayashi reports, “Sony also announced a new feature on Music Unlimited, which is already available as an application for Google’s Android operating system. Since it is a streaming music service, Sony said users can now temporarily store, or cache, playlists for when the online service is not connected to the Internet.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s like giving a glass of lukewarm water to someone in heaven.
Correction:
It’s like giving a glass of lukewarm water to someone in heaven for $3.99, or a whole pitcher for $9.99.
Yeah, but for countries that Apple doesn’t provide iTunes Music it’s really like Ice Cold refreshing water.
Subscription music has never worked.
If iOS users do not use Subscription Music, no one will.
This is the last chance for subscription music.
The fat lady is about to sing.
My sister is *not* fat but boy can she sing! Her comments will follow…
I know plenty of people that pay for satellite radio.
The elegance of Apple’s method is that everything is already in iTunes. For example, iTunes Match makes all of your music in iTunes available from “the cloud” automatically, with no tedious manual uploading. If you make a change in your iTunes library, the change is automatically uploaded to iCloud.
If that $3.99 is a monthly fee, that’s almost double the $25 a year for iTunes Match. The streaming of music “channels” is what Pandora provides for free (with some ads), and that’s a great service.
Sony… less convenient, more expensive.
Anything Sony I stay away from since the early 90’s. SONY is over…
For me it was their proprietary “Memory Stick” that did it. They put that slot in every Sony product (instead of a standard CF or SD slot), so I didn’t buy anymore Sony products. Simple solution.
SONY is over…
Miracles happen. Apple dumped their Marketing-As-Managment morons and got Steve Jobs to revive the entrepreneurial spirit at Apple again. The same could happen at Sony this spring after their current dumbass of a CEO leaves the company. If, however, Sony simply toss another Marketing Moron into the CEO chair, I’ll be writing them off.
And Sony used to be so smart.
A subscription service is totally fscking useless outside of a wifi zone.
As long as networks cap monthly data at 500Mb or 1Gb/month, then this has already died on its ass. I can barely get a good enough data connection for looking at web pages most of the time, my 3G signal frequently drops to Edge or lower, and streaming BBC digital radio back when I still had unlimited used 500Mb/WEEK!
And that was only listening for five hours a day, on average.
I won’t pay for something like Spotify, and I certainly won’t pay for this. If I’m paying for music, then I’m paying to own it, not rent it at the whim of someone like Sony.
Remember the rootkit infected CD’s?
I certainly do. How can they be trusted after that?
As an app developer firmly committed to the idea that music you own on your device is actually pretty freaking awesome….
Thanks for the analysis MDN. 🙂
I will never never never never never never never pay for a music subscription service.
Got that, Sony? Just in case you haven’t- I will NEVER pay for a music subscription service.
“Top 25 Stocks for the NEXT 25 Years: RealNetworks – BloggingStocks” was the headline in 2007.
Jun 5, 2007 … This Seattle-based company has a market capitalization of $1.3 billion.
On January 7, 2010, RealNetworks market cap was $0.25B.