Subscription Music Plan for Cellphones

According to Reuters, British Omnifone has signed deals with the big four music labels (Universal, EMI, Sony/BMG, and Warner Music) and 30 cell carriers to sell subscriptions to unlimited music downloads on cell phones.

The service, called MusicStation, will work on all 2.5-3G compatible phones. It is being released throughout Europe, starting today with Sweden, a full two weeks before the iPhone release. They expect 80% of Western Europe’s existing phones to be compatible with the service.

MusicStation costs 2.99 euros/week or 1.99 pounds/week for downloading an unlimited number of songs. Songs take about 15 seconds to download and by the end of the year Omnifone expects to have a library of over 1 million songs. The application lets you make playlists, find new artists, and follow artist specific news.

Finally, a subscription "all you can eat" plan for music on your cellphone that you can download over the network. I have been waiting like 10 years for this to become a reality, glad to see it is now happening. Hopefully this will be making it stateside soon. At $12-15 a month, that sound reasonable, especially if they let you use the subscription on your computer as well. Who needs to limit themselves to the few albums they are willing to buy, when you can listen to whatever you want (and know where ever you want) with a subscription plan?

Steve Jobs says he isn't interested in subscription based music, but he also said he wasn't interested in a video iPod or getting into the cellphone business. Here's hoping he changes his mind on this as well.

via TechCrunch