Looking at the Three UK MusicStore

Link: Welcome to 3 Music – UK

Every track you buy on your PC is available to you at no extra cost on your mobile. Just check out My Music on your mobile, and you will find all the tracks you have ever purchased in 3MusicStore. They are ready for you to download. You can also purchase a track on your mobile and download it to your PC at no extra cost via My Music.

I’ve been looking closely at the Three UK MusicStore service. I think I will probably extend my Three contract so I can get a handset that works properly with it and check it out. It appears, from what I can see, to be rather smart. The marketing messages I’ve been seeing have very much been centred around ‘dual download’. In fact if there’s one thing I remember from the various MMS promos and physical literature I’ve received about it, it’s the fact that you can download music to your phone and also to your PC. Which is good. Which is required, actually, if you’re going to put minds at rest.

From this text, it looks like you can actually ‘subscribe’ to your music. I’m not quite clear if this is the case. Sounds like it. So I’ll take a look and find out. The idea that you can purchase a track online then go to your mobile and find it there, ready to download, is very appealing.

However I’d really like to get away from physicality. I really don’t care about bits and bytes. I bought ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson, and now I want to listen to it. I don’t want to be troubled with downloading and sodding about with disk space and backup.

One of the most depressing sights is the arse of an annoying message that pops up with you buy a piece of music on iTunes. It says some inane message like ‘Your music is valuable! Don’t forget to back it up!’

You what?

If I’ve bought a piece of music on iTunes, I’m not buying a piece of data. At least, that’s not how I look at it. I have subscribed to get access to that track on-going. I expect iTunes to keep a record of that and should I ever move to a new computer or should I login to iTunes Mobile on my new Apple iPhone, I fully expect — nay, DEMAND — to see all my purchases there, ready to listen to. NOT ready to download. I don’t want to be encumbered with owning data. I don’t want to have to manage it. Stick it in the cloud please. Let me access it dynamically from whatever device I choose.

Of course that’s not how iTunes functions… and I suspect that this isn’t how the Three UK MusicStore functions either. But I’m emboldened to hope it might be.