Samsung to launch own online subscription music service
Samsung has announced that it has teamed up with MusicNet and will offer a subscription-based online music service to complement its forthcoming music players, including the K5.
Though there’s plenty of talk in the announcement about how wonderful the experience is going to be for owners of Samsung music players, there’s not a huge amount of tangible information about how the service works, so I’m afraid my assumptions have started to kick in.
Subscription based: this speaks to me of users paying a monthly fee to download music, and potentially not to actually own that music but to ‘rent’ it as per some other services.
However, it also talks about making music purchases and burning tracks to CD, so there could be a way of buying music tracks outright.
The service will initially be available in the UK, France and Germany, and the music library will contain over 2 million licensed songs, as a combination of ‘all of the major record labels’ and over 40,000 independents.
Whether the music service will work with other players – or if it becomes an iPod/iTunes-esque tie-in – also remains to be seen.
What do you think? Is there room for yet another online music service?
Samsung / MusicNet websites
