CTIA: AT&T making mobile music simpler

LAS VEGAS -- AT&T is unveiling new mobile music capabilities in part to make it easier for even the non-hip cell phone user to begin taking their music on the road. For the in-crowd of tech-savvy young people, the new services offer new features for both customizing ringtones and listening to music and further cement the ties between the PC and the cell phone as music management devices.

The new capabilities were launched last week and included the ability to create customized ringtones from a catalog of 250,000 songs from major labels that is constantly updated as well as the ability to listen to music on your phone that is streamed from your PC. In addition, AT&T expanded its relationship with Napster to enable its customers to search a catalog of more than 5 million phones and preview 30-second samples before buying and downloading the music to a cell phone. The same download sends the purchased music to the PC for storage.

Most of this new stuff is aimed at the AT&T customer who is constantly changing ringtones, admitted Mark Nagel, AT&T’s director of music and personalization products. “Our average customer downloads just under three ringtones a month,” he said. mSpot Make-UR-Tones will cost $6.99 a month for three ringtones, but those can now be self-chosen snippets of a much wider variety of songs.

AT&T hopes to get more people thinking of their wireless handset as their music-delivery device in other ways, such as adding a music button to its handsets that automatically takes customers to a Media Mall. mSpot Remix is a music-on-demand application that connects the mSpot Remix mobile player with a PC over the AT&T network and lets users stream songs they have stored on their PC for playback onto the phone. The service costs $9.99 a month and has one caveat: The songs have to have been ripped from a CD, not downloaded via iTunes.

“We think most people today manage their music through their PC,” Nagel said. “This allows you to transfer it over to the phone, and it’s a logical place to start with customers who are trying to manage their music on the go. We do hope to build awareness with this, because we know that not everyone realizes their phones can do all these new things.”

By clicking on the music button, the consumer sees a variety of options, one of which – MusicID – lets them hold a phone to a music source, such as a radio, and identify, through the song signature, the name of the song and the artist. Another allows consumers to listen to XM radio on their handset.

“We are letting customers choose how they want to use their music,” Nagel said. On the XM channel, popups give users options to download ringtones or wallpaper based on the songs that are playing.