Cricket's Muve Music service succeeding by untraditional means

Leap, the mobile provider behind the pre-paid Cricket brand, maintains that the key to its success has been its cost leadership, which its winning music service seems to support. In just five months, Cricket's Muve Music service has passed 100,000 users and exceeded 100 million song downloads, the company announced today. That's more subscribers than unlimited music services Mog and Rdio have acquired combined, according to music pub Billboard.

Leap also notes that it took the Apple iTunes store 15 months to reach that figure, but given that Apple had to first establish and popularize the format, in 2003, we'd say the point still goes to Apple.

Still, undisputedly impressive are the facts that Muve has doubled its subscriber base in just over two months; 50% of Muve's customers are new to Cricket; and Muve customers are downloading, on average, 400 songs a month. Customers are also super happy.

"According to our customer research, Muve Music scores a 90 percent satisfaction rating, and 95 percent of customers would recommend the service to family and friends," Cricket CEO Doug Hutcheson said in a statement. "These ratings are the highest of any product or service Cricket has launched to date."

It's notable that the songs are downloaded, not streaming. Also, while Hutcheson said the company is working "aggressively" to bring the service to the Android platform later this year, it's for now only available on one phone, designed for the purpose — the touch screen-based Samsung Suede feature phone. And, the music can't be transferred to other devices.

So how does this add up to a major win?

"It's an easy-to-use service that's priced properly. That's it," reports Billboard. "Muve was built from the ground up as a mobile music service, embedded directly into the operating system of the phone. Songs download in a matter of seconds. Users can share tracks, use Shazam to ID and buy songs. It all just works and it's cheap."

The contract-free Suede costs $199.99, and from there, users get unlimited voice, text, 3G Web browsing and music for $55 a month. It's a strategy to take note of, in a time of growing, cloud-based offerings.

Amazon and Google now offer streaming music services, and Apple's iCloud similarly lets users listen to music they already own, on various devices, over the cloud. Soon, they'll also be joined by Spotify, the Swedish outfit that's enjoyed considerable success in Europe and on Wednesday announced it's coming to the U.S.

Spotify's free, advertising-laced service has 10 million users, by the company's count, and another million people pay for its Premium, unlimited service.
The one baby hiccup now standing in the way of Spotify's U.S. adventure, according to reports, is the licensing it has yet to secure with Warner Music Group. (Agreements with EMI, Sony Music and Universal Music Group are already in place, according to the Los Angeles Times.)

...Well, that hiccup, and the question of how to compete with so many heavy hitters already lined up.