Mobile Carriers Eager About iTunes on Mobile Phones

by Anton Shilov
09/05/2005 | 09:44 AM

At least three mobile phone operators around the globe are reportedly enthusiastic about offering its clients ability to acquire music in Apple’s iTunes online music store. The companies plan to sell special iTunes-enabled mobile phones, but it is unclear on which terms they plan to let the customers download the tracks.

T-Mobile of Germany, O2 from the U.K. as well as Cingular from the U.S. plan to announce a deal with Apple and allow its clients to use iTunes music store via special mobile phones from Motorola, Reuters news-agency reports. T-Mobile has reportedly officially announced the intention to enable iTunes in its networks by Christmas, 2005. Cingular and O2 declined to comment, it is claimed.

While both O2 and T-Mobile have been offering their clients music download for some time now, they only could provide a limited number of tracks, whereas Apple’s iTunes contains over 1.5 million tracks from all four major music companies and over 1000 leading independent labels, according to the company.

Apple charges $0.99 per track in its online music store, whereas O2 wanted its clients to pay £1 – £1.5 per song in its store. It is unknown how much a track will cost via a mobile version of the iTunes. It is also interesting to point out that European mobile operators charge about €10 per megabyte of GPRS traffic, whereas a typical song that weighs about 7MB is unlikely to cost more than €2 or €3. Still, mobile operators are interested to offer new services to clients, as it boosts their revenues.

Peculiarities and specifications of iTunes-compatible products from Motorola were not touched upon, but the actual unveiling may be scheduled for September 7, 2005.