BlackBerry Music: might not be entirely stupid
Via Harry Marks, AllThingsD reports on BlackBerry Music:
Five dollars a month.
Well, that’s not too bad.
Fifty songs
Sorry, what? 50 songs? For five bucks? The same price as you get thousands of songs from Spotify for? Are you MENTAL?
you can share with your friends.
Aha. And there’s the possible non-stupid of this idea. See, one thing’s pretty obvious when bumbling about in cities: the kids love their BlackBerries; also, kids love sharing and they rather enjoy music. A low-cost service where you can easily share your favourite songs with your friends actually sounds pretty interesting.
There are just two snags:
- Most kids don’t see any value whatsoever in music. It’s online and ‘free’ via torrents, and so why pay?
- Isn’t BlackBerry primarily a business-focussed company? What’s with trying to compete with Apple all the time? JUST STOP.
Add to this the hardly surprising revelation that the music is trapped on BlackBerry devices and won’t be accessible to any other hardware and you have the music service equivalent of so much RIM output: a nice idea realised in a ham-fisted manner. Here’s hoping someone gives it a wee boost before it’s revealed to the general public, or it’ll be yet more ammo for the ‘RIM is out of touch and directionless’ crowd.
Spotify already incorporates (albeit a very limited type of) social interaction via Facebook, where people can recommend songs via shared playlists.
Apple already tried combining social and music with Ping, which took off like the Hindenberg. At some point, these companies need to realize that social isn’t going to be the Ingredient X they need to make their service the Powerpuff Girls of online music.