Saying No to the Yes Man
Sprint has just launched an music store for PCS phone customers according to a Pollstar report from over the weekend. I often wonder who thinks of these ideas and how they’ve managed to keep their gigs. First off, it only available for Sprint (and not Nextel) customers and you need a particular handset to support it to boot. It’s more than twice the going rate for a single song (US$2.50) but they license two copies one for the phone, one for the computer. Two copies? BFD. Plus you have to sign up for the multimedia service and pay for the airtime/data transfer. There are only 250k songs and you can’t see what is in the library until you sign up. Weak.
I suppose it’s a natural extension of the ringtone sales phenom but it seems to me to be more a case of “quick, let’s do something fast” instead “let’s do something really good”. Want to bet that this thing will be swept under the rug in less than a year?