Vodafone Australia offers unlimited mobile music, for $2.75 per week

Stuart Corner
Monday, 22 September 2008 06:17

Your IT - Home IT

Vodafone Australia has launched the Omnifone MusicStation service offering its customers the freedom to download as many tracks as they like from Omnifone's million track catalogue for a flat fee of $2.75 per week.

The services is available to both prepaid and postpaid customers and there are no additional charges for the data traffic associated with the downloads. It looks like a good deal. The only downside is that once you cease subscribing or change networks you lose access to all the tracks you have downloaded.

However this does not appear to have deterred customers. The service was launched by Vodafone UK late last year and by Jun 2008 had become the UK's largest digital music subscription service, overtaking PC-centric services in terms of subscriber numbers.

In that month it also beat nominations for Google, Nokia Music Store, Yahoo! Connected Life and Sky Mobile TV to take out the 'Best Mobile Internet Service' award at the UK Mobile Industry's Awards.

The Omnifone catalogue includes music from major record labels including Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Music and Warner Music Group and from a range of local and independent artists including Shock, Liberation Music, All Killer, Blue Pie, Destra and MGM.

According to Vodafone, MusicStation creates a profile for each user, which automatically swaps out their least listened to tracks for newly downloaded songs if they run out of memory. Also, when a customer upgrades to a new handset or if they need to replace one that is lost or stolen, MusicStation will automatically restore their music, playlists and preferences. Customers can also build a music-based social network and can send their favourite playlists and tracks to other MusicStation subscribers.

Vodafone PR manager, Jessica Forrest, told iTWire that MusicStation compresses tracks to the EAAC+ format which gives an average file size of 1.2MB, one third that of MP3, but retaining "near CD quality".

Forrest said that Vodafone would continue to offer its Music Store service which offers tracks at $1.99 or complete albums for $15.99 to download to PC or mobile as well as ringtones
 
The service was launched by Vodafone New Zealand last week and follows launches with Vodafone UK in September 2007, with 3 Hong Kong in October 2007 and Vodafone South Africa in November 2007. In Australia, Vodafone has a six month exclusivity deal with Omnifone.

At launch, MusicStation is available from Vodafone Australia on nine handsets: LG KU990 Viewty, Nokia 6121 classic, Nokia E65, Nokia N73, Nokia N95 8GB, Sony Ericsson C902, Sony Ericsson W880i, Sony Ericsson W890i, and the Nokia 6210 Navigator. The Nokia 6210 from Vodafone comes with the MusicStation application preloaded.

Oddly, Vodafone NZ supports MusicStation on a several more handsets: eighteen in total, nine from Nokia including the N95 1GB version and eight from Sony Ericsson.

In Australia, Vodafone customers will only be able to download full length tracks in 3G areas. However, Omnifone claims to support "handsets from all manufacturers whether they are Java or Symbian, 2.5G or 3G.