Unlimited music downloads: someone's thinking at Vodafone

Vodafone brings in unlimited music downloads to phones. Now what to do about people with bad taste who play tracks without headphones...

It seems that Vodafone might be starting to get a clue about digital music distribution. It’s just partnered up with a firm called Omnifone to release a piece of software for mobile phones called MusicStation.

It lets you download as many songs as you want for a flat fee -- specifically $11.95 per month. There are no extra data download costs – whether you download one song or thousands, the service will only ever cost you a flat $2.75 per week.

It all works through an application called (unsurprisingly) MusicStation. Songs can be downloaded, rated, sent to friends and added to playlists.
Downloading songs is surprisingly easy. The text-heavy user interface lets users search or browse for tracks. It takes two clicks to add a song to the download queue, and downloads take place in the background while you use the software.

Karen Paterson, head of Vodafone’s Live! service, said that songs weighed in at an average of 1.2MB and would take “seconds” to download. When we tested the service, downloads took between 5 and 30 seconds.

In other countries, where MusicStation has been operating for some time, users downloaded, on average, hundreds of tracks per month.

So what’s the quality like? Tracks are stored in eAAC+ (Enhanced Advanced Audio Coding, also known as HE-AAC v2) format at 48-64kbps. Apparently the European Broadcasting Union ran comparison testing and said this level produced “excellent” sound; equivalent to 128kbps or higher bitrate MP3 samples.

I did some sound testing with David Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” on CD, 128kbps mp3 and eAAC+, through a pair of Etymotic headphones. I found the eAAC+ tracks to be just as good as the CD.

The service has support from major music labels including Universal, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner, as well as local and independent labels Shock, Liberation Music, All Killer, Blue Pie, Destra and MGM.

“The labels understand that [subscription music] is where the business is going. You have to give customers what they want – ‘cause if you don’t, they’re going to be on peer-to-peer sites,” said David Loiterton, Omnifone MD.

The Beatles still aren’t available. Typical.

Because MusicStation has the potential to download an impossibly large number of tracks to your phone, memory management is important. When the phone starts to run out of memory, it picks the least-used tracks and deletes them. The song’s details stay in your music library, and the next time you want to listen to it, MusicStation just downloads it again.

There’s one big downside to the system. You’ve got access to songs that you’ve downloaded only while you’re a paying subscriber. As soon as you stop paying, you can’t use MusicStation, and you can’t access the songs that you’ve downloaded to your mobile.

We asked David about the potential to hack MusicStation. After all, eAAC+ tracks are playable on Winamp and VLC; surely someone has tried to take the files off the mobile phone and hack them under a PC.

David looked at me blankly, and said, “Why would anyone want to do that? Anyway, it’s impossible.”

Hmm.

MusicStation is available today through Vodafone’s website. You’ll need to download the MusicStation application and install it on your mobile phone. It only works on recent handsets, and doesn’t work on the iPhone yet.

For post-paid accounts, it’ll be added onto your bill. For pre-paid accounts, you need to buy a Vodafone Extras Pack, which is sold at the same places as recharge cards.