Cloud music services are all the rage for mobile devices these days. Whether it’s Apple’s iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google’s Music Beta, Spotify, or any number of others, the best way to get music on your phone no longer involves wires. Unless, that is, you have a BlackBerry, in which case you’ve been out in the cold with the announcements of every major cloud music service.
Today, that’s about to change. Research In Motion, maker of the once-popular BlackBerry smartphones, has announced the launch of BBM Music. It’s a major step in the catch-up battle RIM’s been fighting lately, but before BlackBerry users get their hopes up, they may want to read the fine print.
BBM Music offers no free option, which puts it out of place compared to offerings from Google and Apple, the two companies that have put RIM in third place in the smartphone market. Instead, for $4.99 a month, you get to choose 50 songs from RIM’s “huge catalog of licensed music.” That’s right, just 50 songs, when Google is offering 20,000 from any source. You can’t even change your “music profile” much after you build it. You can swap out only 25 songs per month.
BBM Music does offer an interesting social listening option that makes up for some of the limitations. The reason the service is called BBM Music is that it integrates with your account on the popular BlackBerry Messenger service. In addition to listening to your own profile, you also get unlimited playback on all your BBM contacts’ profiles. So as long as you have a lot of friends on BBM, they all pay $5 a month too, and you all choose different songs for your profiles, you can get a pretty great music library out of this service. Maybe it’ll work in England, because we know Blackberries are still popular there.
It’s good that RIM is trying to address some of their failings in the consumer space. Their only hope as a company is to adapt with the market they once ruled. But I think they’re going to have to come up with something a little bit better than this.
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