The company's name is Omnifone, and its (only) product is MusicStation. Thanks to agreements with some major players - Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung among them - the MusicStation software will be preinstalled on coming phones. Omnifone expects to reach 100 million mobile phones in one year with its software, versus Apple's iPhone target of 1 million mobile phones.

MusicStation has 2 distinct advantages over iTunes - the first is a set of strategic relationships with high-powered companies such as Openwave (an agreement which grants Omnifone access to numerous wireless carriers around the world), several music industry labels, and those aforementioned phone manufacturers. The second advantage is that the service will be rolled out ahead of the iPhone launch (the service debuted yesterday in Sweden), at least where Europe is concerned. So far, there's no plans for MusicStation to enter the U.S. market.

Another interesting tidbit is Omnifone's subscription-based model, where users pay a set fee each week (right now 2.99 euros) for access to the service's complete database of music. This is a pretty huge contrast to Apple's iTunes model in which users pay a set fee per song. Unfortunately, it also means that consumer's won't own the actual song, and will lose the playback rights once they leave MusicStation. And that brings us to...

The music isn't stored on the phone. You can take that as a good or a bad thing - if you lose your phone you've still got access to the songs, but you'll also be forced to stream the music to the phone. Which is a hit-or-miss in my opinion.

Still, it's nice to see that there won't just be one music service out there for mobile phones. Along with MusicStation, several other companies are also jumping onto the mobile music bandwagon. Think Napster and Vodafone.

Source: "Omnifone's Musical Challenge to iPhone" - BusinessWeek

Tags: musicstation, software

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