Michael Gartenberg – Sprint Music Store – Who is the market for this? Michael Gartenberg is out this morning with a post on Sprint’s new “music store” service where they will sell you a song for your Sprint cell phone for $2.50. Can anyone say rip off?
While certainly some clueless individuals will take advantage of this (perhaps the same ones willing to pay Apple Computer $1.99 a show for low res TV), this is in my opinion laughable.
Certainly there is a huge and compelling case to be made for integrating your mp3 player into your cell phone. But for my money why not just buy the Audiovox SMT5600 smartphone and then just synch any of my exisiting music or podcasts on to the phone whenever I feel like it? This is what I use and it works great for me and I don’t even need to be annoyed by Sprint and their overpriced crap. What’s more, who needs to pay the cell phone companies all this money for the ringtones they sell when I can convert any mp3 into a ringtone on my Audiovox SMT5600?
The cellular providers of course are hoping that there will be enough suckers out there to buy these expensive songs and to keep purchasing their ringtones but don’t count on it.