REVIEW: Don’t blame Sprint Nextel for slow mobile music adoption

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: Sprint Music Store
Running on: Samsung Instinct on Sprint Nextel’s CDMA network
Yay: 99 cent price per song matches industry standard. Super-quick preview and download.
Nay: DRM makes track movement tricky. UI and cellular connection make browsing tedious. And where are the full album downloads?
We say: Sprint Nextel’s Music Store may not be the most convenient way to search for digital music and the DRM issues definitely are a hassle, but the convenience and pricing of the service is hard to beat.
Review: You can’t blame Sprint Nextel for what has been a slow uptake of mobile music services. The carrier was one of the first to allow users to search and download digital tracks straight from their handsets and after being hounded for initially pricing tunes at $2.50 apiece, the carrier now offers two tracks, one for your phone and one for your desktop, for 99 cents.
The music store itself loads fairly quickly and is available on many of the carrier’s handsets. Within a matter of seconds I had the store up and running on a Samsung Instinct.
Each track includes a preview option that plays a 30 second segment of the song. Once selected, songs downloaded in seconds. The service, which is powered by Livewire, claims to offer millions of tracks, and a quick browse seems to back that claim. The music offered is diverse, with all of the usual big names that grace MTV as well as a vast selection of smaller, relatively unknown acts.
The service provides several ways to navigate through the catalogue including a simple “search” option, but for those who just want to browse the full library, the cellular connection leaves much to be desired.
Sprint Nextel does have a “Free Songs This Week” section. Most of the songs are from lesser-known artists, but occasionally a well-known track is up for grabs.
The service also has a music player that basically collects all of the songs that have been downloaded or side-loaded into the device and allows the user to create playlists of those tracks. It seemed to work well, though the service bogged down trying to import our side-loaded music. It was also occasionally unable to complete the importing process.
Our biggest complaint about the service is the copyright-protection software. When a track is downloaded to a memory card on a handset it can only be played on that device. Attempts to insert and play the songs on a memory card into another Sprint Nextel device are greeted with “device not authorized.” Also, since the songs are downloaded in Windows Media format, those music lovers attached to Apple computers or to the iTunes store are out of luck.
Less bothersome, but still frustrating, is the somewhat cumbersome UI used for the music store. We understand it’s difficult to display millions of songs on a 3-inch screen in an easy-to-use format, but there has to be a better solution than the endless scrolling currently required.
Despite the limitations, the Sprint Music Store is a relatively painless way to acquire new music and the current pricing model makes purchases a no brainer.