News from the Music Industry

The new service lets AT&T customers preview and purchase music directly from their handsets, with access to an estimated catalog of 2.7 million OTA (over-the-air) tracks. That makes it the largest wireless music catalog available, according to eMusic. Once a subscriber purchases a song, it’s downloaded directly to the cell phone. Meanwhile, a duplicate copy is also available for downloading to a user’s PC later on.

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The announcement also marks the first time AT&T is offering an over-the-air music download service. Its existing AT&T Mobile Music (formerly Cingular Music ) service let users purchase music online from Yahoo! or Napster, download the files to their PCs, and then “side-load” them to compatible AT&T handsets.

However, there’s a twist: with the new eMusic Mobile service, users don’t buy tracks on an individual basis. They also don’t subscribe to the service and rent access to the entire catalog, a la Napster-To-Go. Instead, the eMusic Mobile service charges $7.49 per month for a subscription; once subscribed, a user can download any five DRM-free tracks in MP3 format from the full catalog.

If a subscriber wants to download more than five songs in any given month, additional booster packs of five songs are available for $7.49 each. Unfortunately, AT&T customers cannot purchase the booster packs ad hoc; they need to subscribe to the service for the base fee of $7.49 per month before they can purchase booster packs.

eMusic said in a statement that eMusic Mobile will be initially available on “some of AT&T’s most robust music devices,” including the Samsung a717, a727, a new version of the Samsung SYNC, and the Nokia N75. Users of these phones can click the music note key, choose Shop Music and then select eMusic from the on-screen menu.