Mobile music continued to dominate news out of the 3GSM World Conference Wednesday with two product launches.
LogicaCMG unveiled a platform that allows users to identify, download and pay for music and other multimedia clips from their handsets. Subscribers can download samples of tunes to use as ringtones or can purchase entire songs in MP3 formats.
The service has been trialed with several networks, the company said, including Germany’s O2, which has been using the platform for more than a year.
“The mobile music market is really going to take off in 2005, and we expect to see the success of today’s iPod business will rapidly extend to music downloaded to mobile phones,” said Chris McDermott, LogicaCMG’s chief executive officer. “The potential for network operators worldwide to generate new revenue streams from it is enormous.”
Meanwhile, Paris-based mobile music company Musiwave launched Smart Radio, a platform that allows carriers to offer streaming music with integrated personalization features to their subscribers. Subscribers can skip tracks and browse titles by genre as if they were accessing their own digital music libraries, the company said. The platform automatically creates personalized music channels based on an analysis of a subscriber’s musical tastes and offers tracks users may be unfamiliar with.
Smart Radio will initially be available on Symbian phones, and Musiwave said it is working with handset manufacturers to deploy the platform on other phones.
Nicolas Pelletier, Musiwave’s chief executive officer, said the platform gives carriers “the ability to deliver music the way consumers want it delivered, while considerably easing the mobile music experience and allowing new music consumption behaviors.”
