Music subscription company Omnifone has announced the first operator deployment of its Music Station product, and gone public with a range of licensing deals with music publishers.
Announced in February at 3GSM World Congress and recently awarded a Meffy in Monte Carlo, MusicStation is a subscription-based music download service that offers users unlimited music downloads over the air to mobile phones equipped with the specific MusicStation application.
Omnifone is also announcing that it now has agreements from Sony Ericsson, Nokia, LG and Samsung to pre-install its client on “several” new handsets. It has a Scandinavian operator (Telenor) signed up to the service and with phones in the shops, and says it has around 30 more ready to go. Swedish consumers will pay SEK25 per week for the service.
In a move critical to its success or failure, Omnifone has signed licesing deals with major record labels Universal Music Group, SONY BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music International and several local and independent labels.
Rob Lewis, ceo and founder of Omnifone, told Mobile Europe that the service is being viewed as a differentiator and customer acquisition tool by operators, and as such the company is offering 3-9 months exclusivity deals with operators in each market, depending on the commitment and likely volumes the operators are offering. As Omnifone is hosting what is essentially the same service for all operators, that time to market lead is pretty much the only differentiator available, Lewis said. Omnifone is partnering with Musiwave to provide its platform for the service in the markets where Musiwave already has presence.
The service will be co-banded between the operators and MusicStation, Lewis said, and only tracks available under Omnifone’s own licensing deals with the labels will be available. In other words, operators will not be able to take their existing catalogues and inject the MusicStation DRM into them.
Lewis said that he thought that operators that did sign up to the MusicStation service would continue to operate WAP portal based services alongside the subscription service.