Where Apple leads, mobile companies will follow, it seems. Vodafone said on Wednesday that it would remove copyright protection on over 1m of the songs it sells through its mobile music store. The company has agreements with three of the “Big Four” music companies – Univeral Music Group, Sony, and EMI – but talks with Warner have been slower.
Its likely Warner will agree in due course, as recently all four of the music majors agreed a similar deal with Apple.
In the meantime users will be delighted to be able to start copying music from artists such as Britney Spears, Coldplay, Duffy, Lady Gaga, Lily Allen and The Fray freely across to PCs, MP3 players and CDs.
Going DRM-free is now very much the trend and mobile operators like Vodafone need to do this to remain competitive. Vodafone’s music store has never quite enjoyed the popularity of iTunes, and is increasingly under threat from rival mobile music offers such as Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which allows unlimited access to music, bundled into the price of the handset.
Meanwhile, the music companies seem increasingly willing to do deals like these as sales dwindle. Mobile phones were meant to be an exciting new way to get people buying music, but the model has had very mixed success. It remains to be seen if this new DRM-freedom can help breathe in new life into the market.
At the same time, also in the footsteps of Apple and its iPhone application store, T-Mobile said the first paid-for Android phone applications would go on sale on Thursday. So far more than 1000 applications have been developed for Android phones but these have all been free.
Being able to earn some money from the tools they have created will help keep Android developers keen. Prices are expected to be a couple of euros per application. T-Mobile gets a cut of all the payments. The company did not disclose the details of its share, but it is thought to be around 30 per
cent, with 70 per cent going to the developer.
