“The NY Times reviews the new music store from Sprint. So let’s see if I get this right. It’s $2.50 a song (more than double the price of PC based services), lower quality (seems about FM radio level based on the compression cited) and can’t be used on an iPod. Of course I also need to buy a new phone and a memory card of least 512mb or so for this to be useful. Battery life is about seven hours as long as I don’t want to make a phone call (who’d want to do that on phone anyway?). Can’t use the songs as ringtones either (but that’s not a shock, ringtones have different license terms). Makes you wonder whether these folks have been living totally isolated from the rest of the world over the last few years or if they just think consumers are so desperate to purchase music on the fly and only want to carry to one device with limited functions,” Michael Gartenberg writes in his Jupiterresearch Blog.
“The real fun will come with the spin when this flops,” Gartenberg writes.
Full article here.
The New York Times piece to which Gartenberg refers was penned by David Pogue who writes, in part, “Unless they’ve just spent four years in a sensory-deprivation tank, surely Sprint’s executives know that the iTunes Music Store and its rivals have solidly established the sweet spot of customer acceptance at $1 a song. What makes Sprint think it can charge two and a half times as much and still make people happy? ‘It’s a new market, the first service of its kind, serving a different type of customer,’ Jackie Bostick, a Sprint spokeswoman, said. ‘We are not necessarily going after people who are downloading tons of music online.’ (Translation: ‘Please don’t bring up the iTunes thing.’) Online, the overwhelming reaction to Sprint’s pricing is disgust and sarcasm.”
Full article here.
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