Cingular soliciting Apple for music service

It is certainly interesting to see what mobile phone customers will pay for that internet users would not even consider unless it was free. We have become accustomed to a free internet. The mobile phone market is different, we know and are happy to pay more...

Apple's take: 1) Apple provides iTMS library to Cingular's customers. Why not, they make no money from music sales anyway. 2) Cingular's customers eat this up and start to purchase ROKR phones and the hundreds of others like it coming out. 3) iPod sales nose dive. 4) Profit.

Will you be able to offload your Cingular bought songs [easily] to iTunes on your computer? Boy, if not, that's pretty pointless, and it's limiting to Cingular's selling power because a ROKR is limited to 100 songs. And, on top of that, one must assume that a user will keep a certain amount of free space for computer to phone music transfers, limiting potential sales even more. The more I see about the ROKR the more I think that it was mostly a Cingular brainchild, it's just too bad that they only have enough brain power to make a dull thud. I hope Apple doesn't further get into bed with Cinguar.

I don't really care. Some people will be smart and buy the 99 track from iTunes, then transfer it to their phone. Others would rather pay the extra money to not have to worry about transferring and what not. You pay more for a service. I still prefer buying songs on CD, so it doesn't interest me either way. Fishes, narco.

I'd bet also that they'd go the ringtone route as well. Pay 2 bucks to DL the song to your phone, then it expires after 90 days!

So they want to make money off a venture, one I'm sure takes a considerable amount of capital investment, time and energy to get off the ground, so what? Say this out loud, it's not bad that they want to make money from an investment, all the while providing a service that people will pay for. Honestly, I don't see it being that useful, as if I did own that ROKR phone, I'd just sync it from my computer (iMac G5) and viola, i'm on my way... but that's just me