“John Paul DeJoria, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Paul Mitchell shampoo and Patron tequila is jumping into the wireless phone business,” Steven Bertoni reports for Forbes.
“His new company ROK Mobile (cofounded with British entrepreneur Johnathan Kendrick) is offering unlimited talk, text and data with an added sweetener of free music streaming,” Bertoni reports. “ROK Mobile is contract free and will cost $49.99 a month. DeJoria has inked music deals with Warner Music, Sony and Universal, giving users more than 20 million songs. Says DeJoria, ‘Everything you can find on iTunes, we have.'”
“ROK Mobile has no fixed infrastructure and runs on the rails of larger carriers – ROK launches on T-Mobile on June 16th and on Sprint on July 4th,” Bertoni reports. “A few weeks ago Apple shocked the tech world by purchasing Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovines’ Beats Music for $3 billion. Beats offers a streaming music service via AT&T. Meanwhile in April Swedish music company Spotify (now with more than 10 million paying customers) partnered with Sprint to power its music offerings. ‘I wish everybody well,’ says DeJoria. ‘But if you look at $49.99 a month, all inclusive we have something different — all the music you want and no contract—zero.'”
“Like Beats and Spotify, ROK Mobile lets you build playlists and create Pandora-like radio stations,” Bertoni reports. “ROK’s music app is not confined to just your smartphone and can be used on desktops, tablets and TVs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tempting – aside from the lesser carriers (we’d more strongly consider it if also offered choices of Verizon and/or AT&T).
If they want to continue to dominate in music sales and hope to dominate in streaming music, Apple had better have a damn good answer to this. Even at full price for each iPhone, $49.99/mo. is less than we’re paying for Verizon’s capped shared data plan and ROK Mobile delivers unlimited talk/text/data, no contract, and comes with 20+ million songs that also play on your Macs, iPads, and TVs!