Mspot offers a plethora of mobile music services
Heather from Kulesa Public Relations grabbed me as I walked into ShowStoppers this evening and asked if I’d heard much about ‘mspot’.
The name rang a bell, but I wasn’t entirely sure about the service offering. I kept thinking and then I remembered I covered them at the beginning of the year when they launched with Alltel. Heather brought me up to date then introduced me to whirlwind CEO, Darren Tsui. He’d just finished being interviewed for a series of television programmes so he was hot to trot, ready to give me the gossip.
So. Four main offerings. First, mspot provide streaming audio from a 115-strong network of metro area radio stations enabling you to listen to your local radio station via your handset’s data feed, wherever you are. So if you feel like catching up on what’s going on with the morning show in New York whilst you’re in California, mspot is the way ahead. As mobile data becomes more ubiquitous and wickedly priced (that’s almost a done deal here in the States), this kind of service gets more and more relevant.
Second, mspot produce a streaming music video service. “Think MTV before all the reality shows,” says Darren, “Just back to back music videos from the likes of Madonna, Timberlake, Janet Jackson. Smart.
Their third offering really caught my attention big time. It’s called Remix and it’s very similar to the subscription-based MusicStation service from Omniphone. Remix product allows you to access your DRM-free music from your PC via your phone. It’s available on java and brew compatible handsets. When you select a song from your collection, it starts streaming right away and archives a copy on your SD card in case you want to listen again (and you’re without signal). I really like the idea of this — the service costs $3.99 per month on Alltel — I imagine it’s a similar charge on other networks.
The final service Darren described is the one they’ve launched today with AT&T — it’s called Make-UR-Tones and it enables you to take a full track and cut your own ringtone for your handset. You can’t do this with your own tracks — instead you browse mspot’s huge 250,000 legal track database. Darren put this in context: Most operators (in the States, anyway) have a ringtone approved database of around 28,000 tracks. Heh. Mspot nails that to the wall and offers subscribers up to three ringtones per month for $6.99. Nice.
They’re focusing on the US at the moment but the mspot board is seriously mulling an international launch. I reckoned they should look at the UK marketplace.
More at www.mspot.com..
