Cingular has just announced that they are to offer their own mobile music service alongside partners Napster, Yahoo Music, XM Satellite Radio and eMusic.
They are now the third US mobile operator to offer their own music service to rival Apple's iTunes. But are they really a threat?
Not likely. Sprint, which a year ago became the first, claims that more than 8 million songs have been downloaded since launching their service. And Verizon, which launched its service in February, claims to be selling more than 1 million downloads per month.
Which both pale into almighty insignificance compared to iTunes which has had over a billion tunes downloaded.
The problem is that downloading music to a mobile phone is still clunky and 'not what a consumer really wants to do with their phone!'
People see MP3 music players as the device for carrying music around and the mobile phone as, well, a phone.
I think in the near term Apple may have a better chance persuading iPod users to make calls on an iPhone than mobile operators will have persuading their users to play music on their phones.
That just leaves Microsoft stuck somewhere in the middle with the 'Zune' - stuck between two stools. Ooh, that even rhymes!
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