T-Mobile turns handsets into mini digital music players

With digital music fans spoilt for choice with a number of recent download service launches, T-Mobile is the latest to try its luck with online music.

The operator has launched Ear Phones – a music download service for mobiles. Ear Phones lets users download and play tunes on their T-Mobile handsets, with three of the five majors – Sony, Warner and Universal – as well as various indie labels signing on the dotted line as partners.

T-Mobile is also launching five new handsets compatible with the new service, with seven more to join the stable before the end of the year.

Currently the service just offers music clips – tunes truncated to less than two minutes – but by next year the operator plans to sell full-length songs as well as videos, with a catalogue of some 250,000 downloads available by Christmas.

O2 and Vodafone have already launched their own mobile music offerings but neither has seen stellar take-up. The mobile operators have been hoping to cash in on the MP3 craze that has seen iTunes and Napster tempted to these shores of late.

T-Mobile is hoping that it'll be able to tempt users to mobiles rather than MP3 players by hooking them on price and convenience.

The starting price for an Ear Tunes handset will be around £30, compared to the hundreds usually needed to secure a digital music player in the shops.

T-Mobile is also banking on broadband – or the lack of it – to give Ear Phones a helping hand.

According to figures from communications regulator Ofcom, 67 per cent of internet connections are made over narrowband – which means the average music downloader without a fat pipe would need to wait between eight and 10 minutes for a song, making Ear Phones' two minutes on a 2.5G phone look positively speedy.

The price per track will be £1.50, however, considerably more than rival MP3 sellers charge – iTunes, for example, charges 79p for most songs. Nevertheless, T-Mobile is predicting it will sell one million tracks by the middle of next year and four million by the end of 2006.