T-Mobile have partnered with Sony Music and Unversal Music to provide a somewhat unique entry to the mobile music market. Called “Mobile Jukebox”, the service allows subscribers to download music clips to their mobile phones.
So far, there are 200 tracks available to choose from – but the real killer is that those tracks are between only 90 and 120 seconds long.
We think this one might have launched a bit early – with only tiny number of tracks currently available, and even those are brutally short, this has an air of “So what?” about it. T-Mobile intend to offer more tracks later in the year, and full length ones too – but will that be enough?
Thomas Gewecke, Senior Vice President of Sony Music Digital Services explained: “Mobile Mix enables music fans to download a 90 to 120 second excerpt of a song in just a couple of minutes, allowing them to get a feel for the music almost instantaneously, and takes the mobile music entertainment experience to an entirely new level.”
Mobile phone users tend to be young and demanding, and require quite high standards form their entertainment, so surely they want considerably more than just to listen to a music clip? It maybe that T-Mobile have misjudged their market here, or were just keen to get some sort of music product out as soon as possible.
T-Mobile on Mobile Mix
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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