Sony Ericsson is the latest handset maker to announce its own all-you-can-eat digital music proposition, putting it into competition with the mobile networks who sell its phones, and who would probably rather consumers used their digital music offers.
Sony Ericsson's PlayNow Plus service, which will launch in Sweden via operator Telenor later this year, repurposes Omnifone's subscription based digital music service already used in the UK market by Vodafone under their MusicStation brand.
The difference between the PlayNow Plus and the MusicStation services - both of which offer Napster-style all-you-can-eat access to music downloads, but access which only continues as long as a subscription is valid - is that PlayNow Plus will allow users to keep permanent copies of their most listened to tracks at the end of their subscription.
This, of course, copies the soon-to-launch download service from their competitors Nokia, Comes With Music, which is a unique take on the subscription model because users can keep everything they download during the year they have access to the Nokia music catalogue (which includes music from all four majors), and, in theory, they could download everything during that time.
The Ericsson/Omnifone service is less generous in terms of quantity - the press release promising users that they can keep a somewhat vague "number of tracks" if and when their contract expires. However, those tracks will be DRM-free. The word on the net is that the Nokia service will provide tracks in a digitally rights managed format locking songs to Nokia devices and/or the Nokia PC player - and, more than that, some say to the actual phone and/or PC that tracks are initially downloaded too, meaning in reality, while the download is permanent, users will stop using them after a couple of years or so.
Following its launch in Sweden, there are plans to roll out PlayNow Plus into other territories in 2009. Meanwhile, Ericsson's PlayNow Arena, an existing mobile multi-media platform that includes an iTunes-style a la carte download service, and which launched in Scandinavia last month, is set to launch in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland later this year. The PlayNow Arena download service provides tracks without DRM, and has all four majors on board, which I think makes it the first mobile download platform to have DRM-free music from all the record companies.
Anyway, here's what Rikko Sakaguchi, Senior Vice President and Head of Creation & Development at Sony Ericsson, has to say about all this: "Expanding our PlayNow service portfolio by adding PlayNow Plus and by launching PlayNow Arena in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and the UK during the fourth quarter, are key elements of the Sony Ericsson service strategy. These steps and the addition of Universal's catalogue to the music offering in both services gives us every possibility to provide customers and consumers with what we feel is important and requested - an unparalleled user experience on Sony Ericsson devices".