Music news

The news that Microsoft Corp. will join Nokia Corp. to deliver a mobile-music platform may have been among the more startling developments at last week’s 3GSM World Congress, but it was only the first of a half-dozen mobile music announcements both out of France and worldwide. Among the notable developments:

• Sony Ericsson made headlines by saying it plans to deliver a mobile phone carrying the Walkman brand of one of the manufacturer’s parent companies, Sony Corp. The handset will support open music file formats such as MP3 and AAC, although it is being designed to work with Sony Music’s online store, which uses the less-popular ATRAC format. The phone is expected to hold roughly six to 10 hours of digital music. Analysts seemed split on the news-many hailed the wisdom of marketing such a noted brand name, while others claimed the Walkman name was tired and dated.
• Motorola offered a glimpse of a forthcoming iRadio service slated for launch later this year. While details were sketchy, the manufacturer said the service will use a high-speed Internet connection and Bluetooth technology to deliver “hundreds of commercial-free Internet channels” on-the-go. Motorola also clarified press reports indicating the E1060 handset is not the much-anticipated iTunes-capable phone. Instead, the company is using the device to showcase an iTunes application that will appear on phones later this year. Observers say Motorola may be developing iTunes-compatible software that could be installed on a variety of the company’s phones.
• LogicaCMG unveiled a platform that allows users to identify, download and pay for music and 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.
• 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. Users can skip tracks and browse titles by genre as if they were accessing their own digital music libraries, the company said. The service automatically creates personalized music channels based on an analysis of a subscriber’s musical tastes and suggests tracks and artists with which users may be unfamiliar.
• MTV Japan and Yamaha said they have launched Japan’s first music-recognition service, MTV Music Finder, to KDDI Corp. subscribers across that country. In partnership with Shazam Entertainment, a U.K.-based audio-recognition company, MTV Japan will work with its local licensee, SystemK Corp., to deliver Shazam’s mobile music-recognition service to KDDI users. First offered to Vodafone subscribers in July 2004, the new service gives users the chance to trial the MTV Music Finder service free on KDDI’s EZ Web data service.