In an effort to stay within hearing distance of the many other mobile music announcements, Sony Ericsson has revamped its Playnow music store to allow subscribers access to a greatly expanded range of content, discoverable through features such as TrackID, which allows users to search for songs using snippets of lyrics.
Sony Ericsson said that it plans to have a new mobile music service up and running by the second quarter of next year. This would be a big step from the phone manufacturer's current platform, which only gives users access to downloads of Sony BMG music.
Sony says it has already received support from EMI Group, Universal Music and Warner Music. "The situation today is that we have offers on the table of five million music tracks, as a first step, from all the majors, as well as local and independent labels," said Sony Ericsson head of content acquisition, Martin Blomkvist.
Consumers will be able to access the Playnow service from their mobile phone and their PC, enabling over the air downloads to the phone or side loading of content from PC to mobile. The majority of the music catalogue will be offered in DRM-free format, the company said.
For more about this story:
- read these articles from TomsHardware.co.uk and Telecoms.com