December 19, 2004 9:00 PM PST

Sprint offers streaming mobile music

By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News

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Sprint on Monday plans to launch a new service for streaming music over the airwaves to cell phones, powered by a company that provides digital music to cable and satellite TV subscribers.

Under the terms of the deal, Music Choice is providing a range of six streaming music channels organized by genre, as well as some music videos and artist interviews for Sprint subscribers who pay about $6 a month. If that sounds a little bit like the radio, it's not entirely a bad comparison, said Dave Del Beccaro, CEO of Music Choice.

The deal is part of a broader drive to turn the humble mobile phone into a kind of iPod on steroids.

"It's like radio in the sense that now you have access to music wherever you are," Del Beccaro said. "But it's better than radio. It's a subscription service, and commercial-free."

The deal is part of a broader drive by mobile phone companies and record labels to turn the humble mobile phone into a kind of iPod on steroids. This trend is particularly strong in Europe and Asia, where mobile phone operators have more advanced data networks and are eager to recoup the tens of billions of dollars they spent for rights to their mobile spectrum.

Many of the music services, including ones recently launched in France and Spain, offer full song downloads to phones, which can then store and play them back like an iPod or other MP3 player. Sony is operating a streaming music service called StreamMan in Finland, with plans to expand it across Europe.

U.S. mobile operators, which are still building their high-speed data networks, have been less ambitious to date with music services. AT&T Wireless offers a way to purchase music through a phone, but the song is downloaded to a computer rather than the phone itself, for example.

The Sprint service will be the first mobile phone-based streaming music service in the United States. It hits the market not long after XM Satellite Radio released a portable version of its hardware called the MyFi.

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