Sprint pockets digital music - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Sprint pockets digital music

By Todd Spangler, Inter@ctive Week
November 09, 2000
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/Sprint-pockets-digital-music/0,139023166,120106862,00.htm

Hoping to grab new customers by the ears, Sprint PCS has launched a music service that lets subscribers play MP3 audio files on a tiny wireless phone.

The Sprint PCS My Music service uses Samsung's US$400 Uproar phone, which has a built-in MP3 player with 64 megabytes of storage that holds about an hour of music.

Sprint PCS, however, isn't yet offering wireless music on demand; at 14.4 kilobits per second, its data network is too slow for that to be feasible. To use the service, users must download MP3 files into the Samsung phone from their computers using RealNetworks' RealJukebox software. But Sprint executives said the service puts the infrastructure in place to deliver audio â€" and, eventually, video â€" over its network once it rolls out higher-speed wireless technologies in 2002.

The music service, the first of its kind offered by a wireless carrier, is targeted at what might be called the Napster demographic: 16- to 25-year-olds who listen to digital music. Timed for the holiday shopping season, the service will be free for one year to those who sign up through mid-January, after which Sprint PCS expects to charge about US$10 per month.

Initially, Sprint PCS higher-ups were nervous about the legal complications of developing an online music service, said John Yuzdepski, vice president of Sprint PCS. "I had five lawyers following me around everywhere I went," he said with a laugh.

Sprint PCS believes it has sidestepped the legal problems plaguing online digital music services such as Napster and MP3.com by requiring users to upload their own MP3 collections to a site, which is managed by Seattle-based HitHive.

Eventually, Sprint PCS intends to offer various kinds of audio content for subscribers to download, and Yuzdep ski said the company is negotiating licensing deals with record labels and other audio content providers.