BBM Music is now available. Will you be signing up?
Is a low price tag and social sharing enough to make BBM Music a hit with the BlackBerry faithful?
Back in August, RIM announced BBM Music. Now, it’s been launched in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and it should be available in App World for you to install in the next 24 hours. It’s up against loads of other streaming music services like Rdio, Slacker, and Grooveshark, but BBM Music stands out for a couple of reasons.
For one, it’s dirt cheap at $4.99 per month. Most competing apps have settled on $9.99 as the going rate for a monthly subscription, so the $60 per year you’d save with BBM Music is worth consideration. Hey, it’d probably cover your cellular bill for a month.
But BBM integration is what really makes Music stand out. Friends can easily recommend and share tunes — up to 50 from your library at a time, with every single one of your BBM contacts. If you’ve got 30 friends in your BBM circle, that’s 1,500 full tracks you can tap into, and they’re shared by people with whom you probably share at least a few favourite bands and songs. Timelines make it easy to see what your friends are listening to and who they’re sharing with, and you’re able to cache tracks to your microSD card for offline play.
Perhaps best of all, RIM is offering a 60-day trial of BBM Music right now. It’s a limited time offer, of course, and it’ll drop down to 30 days sometime in the very near future — still not a bad deal, since many streaming services don’t offer trials any more. If you need a bit more convincing, you can check out the official launch video below to get a sneak peek at what BBM Music has to offer.
For those of you with a BlackBerry who are connected with a large number of other BlackBerry users, BBM Music is a pretty good deal. If, on the other hand, you’d rather not limit your portable music library to what’s floating around your BBM circle, you may want to download Slacker Radio and take it for a spin. Other than that, we’re pretty limited when it comes to BlackBerry-compatible cloud music apps here in Canada.
BlackBerry owners, what say you? Will you be installing BBM Music and kicking the tires for two months? Are you interested enough to shell out five bucks a month for a subscription? Sound off in the comments!
[Source: Inside BlackBerry]
If all you want is an outlet to buy cheap tunes, fill your boots.
If find it odd that RIM postponed many things, but managed to get a revenue generating music store up and running. Hmmm… Must be my paranoia kicking in ;b
Too bad we can’t use our $100 credit for the tunes. I still cant understand why they did that…
I was once a huge RIM supporter, but now I’m eyeballing few different Android phones for when my contract expires in a few months.
I think I”m the only person in my circle of friends left with a BBERRY. Any of my friends who have a Blackberry despise them since they are ‘work phones’ and are so locked down they cant use all the features.
For example, one of my friends has the GPS and Camera disabled by work.
I hope RIM can turn this around, but I fear a Nortel-type ending or an outright buyout.
I will not be downloading music from RIM. I have an iPod Touch have not used 1/3 of its storage, and it works as advertized, perfectly easy and perfectly well. In the last two year’s RIM has been really late to the post and even when they show up it’s a complete bust.
In other words “coitus them”.
Or more correctly “advertised” lol.