AT&T and eMusic team up
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Well, well. It seems that AT&T has some mobile music download tricks up their sleeves. Beginning July 31st, AT&T customers with select handsets will be able to download tracks directly from eMusic.com. EMusic is one of the few online music retailers to offer completely DRM-free files, making the transition to mobile downloading that much easier. The service will be offered for $7.49/month which includes 5 song downloads of your choice. Supported handsets will be the Samsung A707, A717, A727, and the Nokia N75. Keep in mind that data charges will also be incurred, so trying to use this service with anything other than an unlimited plan could mean costly overages. It’s certainly not the best service out there, and it ain’t cheap, but the lack of DRM means that you should be able to transfer purchased tracks to your desktop with nary a hitch. Good looking, AT&T. Other guys, please take note.
Thanks, Anonymous tipster!
The information above could not be confirmed by the BGR staff at post time, but due to the detail in the tip we received, we believe it’s legitimate.
First off if you must go the way of legit music and wish to use emusic why not just do it through a pc and the do a transfer, most of those phones can do this (the loading them via pc) so why would you wish to do it via mobile phone where it will cost you even more?
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Convenience, Victor. I don’t like the monthly pricing (AT&T has some jacked up pricing ideas, imo) but the convenience of being able to download music on the go is phenomenal. I’ve been doing it with Symella on my N75 for a while now.
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While I agree that wireless music downloads would be very convenient, a large part of the reason why I subscribe to eMusic is music discovery - and I doubt I’d be doing much of that on my cell phone’s small screen and sluggish connection. Even still, I hope eMusic and AT&T take some time to come up with a friendly interface for this service.
For the time being, I’ll continue to transfer music to my phone the way Victor describes. Much faster for my purposes.
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I can say this is confirmed
People will use this because it’s rare they are at home when they hear a song on the radio that they “must have”, or when they are out with friends and hear something that they “must have”.
I think instead of the monthly service it should have been a per song pricing, but this is a good start and it’ll provide a constant revenue line for the music department of AT&T.
I welcome this move and think it’ll spur more activity with OTA material.
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It could be pricey… although since AT&T adds on the unlimited data package when you buy those 3G phones (subsidized), it’s quite possible that most of the users (though definitely not all) will already have unlimited data…
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Yes, it is confirmed, also, i believe it said you’ll be able to download the same track to your PC and Phone for one charge, assuming you downloaded it to your phone already.
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“People will use this because it’s rare they are at home when they hear a song on the radio that they “must have”, or when they are out with friends and hear something that they “must have”.
That really doesn’t apply here because most of the stuff that you will hear on the radio is not on eMusic.
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