Thumbplay let us know they have inked a deal with Cellular South, the largest private wireless carrier, to offer their subscription music store on their BlackBerry devices. The Thumbplay subscription service will be available for the regular $9.99/month price to all Cellular South customers but it looks like it will not be preloaded on new sold devices. Instead customers will be able to download the app from Cellular South’s Discover Center Website.
While most of you could care less about this news I thought it was interesting to highlight it for one reason. The BlackBerry OS is one of the only smartphones that does not ship with a built in music store. The iPhone has iTunes and Android/WebOS have Amazon’s MP3 market.
I think that RIM is due to launch their own music store solution or at least partner with another company to preload their music store on devices. This could be a big revenue generator for RIM if they were open to the idea. My hunch is that Lazaridis would start harping about “bandwidth optimization” but it could really open a new market for RIM. It would not take much for them to integrate a music, or at the very least a ringtone store into the App World application.
Let us know what you think in the comments…
DavidB ( View Profile) - Posts: