RIM launches new music sharing service
26 Aug 2011
Research In Motion has launched a new music sharing service that comes with BlackBerry Messenger.
According to RIM, the service which is integrated with BBM lets users discover the tunes their friends were listening to and lets them enjoy the users' songs too.
BBM Music does this very much unlike the freemium model of Spotify that allows users to see their Facebook friends in its service, and also quite unlike Apple's iTunes, which allows its users to see what friends are listening to via its Ping social network.
BBM Music connects to a BlackBerry owner's BlackBerry Messenger friends list from where a BBM Music user would have to pay $5 a month to build a music profile of 50 songs, up to 25 of which could be switched out with new songs each month.
RIM is saying only about that much at present. On BBM Music users could listen to their 50 song playlist as also their friend's 50 song playlists.
For those who liked what they heard on BBM Music, RIM was linking to the Amazon MP3 store for song purchases. Songs on a user's playlist could be downloaded to a BlackBerry's storage memory for offline listening, or songs could be streamed over wireless networks.