CTIA: Sprint gets aggressive on mobile music

ORLANDO--Sprint today at CTIA Wireless signaled its intentions to attack the mobile music market full force, announcing that it is dropping the charge for a full-track over-the-air download from $2.49 to $0.99, the same price Apple iTunes and other online services charge for a wired broadband download.

The aggressive pricing represents a shift in Sprint’s approach to music and its data services. Instead of trying to make money on each track sold, Sprint is trying to encourage more downloads and more use of its Power Vision 3G service. With the song artists, record companies, distributors and aggregators each taking a cut of the songs’ cost, Sprint is likely making little revenue on each track sold, just as Apple makes little money off songs sold on iTunes. But just as Apple uses iTunes to drive sales of its iPod line of digital music players, Sprint appears to be trying to break its digital music service wide open, encouraging mass downloads over the network and the $15 or more monthly service subscription fees that make downloading that many megabytes affordable.


Sprint director of wireless data programming and marketing Alana Muller said Sprint is simply encouraging customers to grow their music libraries and embrace mobile music by eliminating what for many was a prohibitive purchase price. While Sprint’s Power Vision music service offered the convenience of getting a song immediately, it cost a full $1.50 more than if a customer waited to purchase the song from on online source like iTunes. With price parity in place, however, there is nothing to prevent customers from using the Sprint music store as their primary digital music source. Sprint also addressed one last impediment to its music service--easy transfer of music from PC to phone and from device to device. It unveiled today the Sprint Music Manager, designed by Smith Micro Software, which acts as a central music repository for a customer’s music library of unprotected songs and downloads from the Sprint store, allowing customers to sideload music easily from the PC to the phone.

Sprint will launch the service plans and rates in April, two months before Apple is expected to release its new iPhone on the Cingular network. The highly anticipated iPod smartphone is expected to be a boon for both Cingular and the mobile music sector, and Sprint’s timing of its new plan is clearly designed to head off Apple’s launch, presenting a similarly priced alternative that brings the added bonus of mobility. To seal the deal, Sprint unveiled its latest music phone at CTIA Wireless 2007, Samsung’s new Upstage, a small dual-sided wafer phone, much resembling an iPod on the front and standard cellphone on the back. What’s more, Sprint is pricing the phone at $150 with a two-year service contract, compared to the $600 to $700 Cingular will charge for the iPhone with a similar two year contract. Instead of 4 GB to 8 GB of memory though, the Upstage has only 64 MB of music memory, but can be upgraded to 2 GB through an expandable MicroSD card slot.

The new rate plans may put Sprint in a competitive position with the Apple and Cingular--not to mention undercutting rival provider Verizon Wireless’ music download standard by half--but it also may draw attention to the disproportionate charges Sprint and the rest of the industry assesses for ringtones versus full track downloads. At the new pricing scale a ringtone--containing only a small portion of a track--can cost up to three times more than the whole song. Sprint’s Muller, however, defended the price difference, saying a ringtone was far more than the sum of its listening length. Ringtones are used to personalize a phone, rather than just content to be consumed privately.

“Clearly the two are different,” she said. “[A ringtone] does serve a different purpose than a full-track song.”