RIAA Makes Mobile Deal With Cricket by George Ziemann — December 22, 2010 The four major labels have a new plan to make income from mobile devices. Well, it's the same old plan they've had for years, but someone finally decided to buy into it. Cricket Communications is going to add a service called Muve, which gives you unlimited downloads of music from all four major record labels. According to the AP report, this is going to basically be free to the consumers, at least initially. The record labels will apparently get paid, but Cricket's price will stay the same as the price for the Android package they already offer. This seems to be another iteration of the plan that Warner Music offered a few years ago, which was to get every person in the country to pay $5 a month for all the music they wanted to listen to. This seems to have morphed into a $10 per-month fee, if the prices for a Rhapsody or MOG subscription prices are an indicator. The downside of the whole deal is that you can't off-load the music from your phone to any other device, so if you change mobile services (or phones, presumably), you lose all the music you've accumulated and have to start all over again. Predictably, there is one gem of questionable logic in the story. First, they explain that half of Cricket's customers don't own a computer, so they're not going to be buying music from iTunes or subscribing to the other services. This leads to the conclusion that without the new service, "The alternative for many people would be to download music illegally." The RIAA has now come to the point where they're focusing their concern on people who don't have a computer? Can't see the wisdom there, but if they can score some bucks from the low-income sector with that excuse, it will probably be easy to get the people with money to fork over as well. They haven't given up on the whole "illegal downloading" smokescreen, either, which is an indication that they (and the media) are going to stick with the disinformation approach to the very end (it's the re-distribution or sharing that is a copyright violation, not the downloading). Since this is basically the same old plan, the same criticisms exist. At the top of the list is how long the four major labels can act as a team when it comes to agreeing which services to support or accept without a legal tussle. It seems as if there is more independent competition than ever, but the only things publicly recognized as "legal" are still overwhelmingly confined to whatever the four majors all give a big group hug. The U.S. Dept. of Justice used to be concerned with this, but that interest seems to have waned considerably in the fast few years. With all the independent competition, it would seem to indicate the existence of a lot of legitimate commercial music that isn't necessarily licensed under the RIAA deal. Does it matter? Has the independent revolution come far enough yet that the general public is going to notice their exclusion? And if the service appears to be free, will anyone even bother to complain? There's an interesting marketing twist on the collection end of this, too. Assuming that the labels (and artists) get paid on the basis of what is downloaded, there's a huge opportunity for reselling the same tracks over and over every time someone upgrades their phone or changes services. What I find interesting is that, in the eyes of the consumer, it actually seems to promote the idea that the music is free. You can have as much as you want for no additional charge beyond your normal cell phone service. So even though they're keeping up the "illegal downloading" angle, they are now taking a different approach, which is to simply hide the cost from the consumer. This seems contrary to the former concern of the industry, which actively wanted to discourage the idea that music could be gotten for free. The new idea seems to be that music is free and disposable.

Muve service includes unlimited music downloads — Yahoo News