Sprint Nextel launching wireless music download service later this year

The good news: Sprint Nextel will be launching a wireless music download service between now and the end of the year. The bad news: They're going to completely screw it up. Unfortunately for Sprint Nextel customers (and ultimately,
Sprint Nextel shareholders), it sounds like execs at the company are living in a fantasy world. With absolutely no trace of irony, Sprint Nextel COO Len Lauer said in a recent interview that "Customers are paying $2 for a shortened version of a song for a ringtone. Will they pay the same for a full song, having the convenience of having it on (a cellphone)? I think they will." Sure, probably a few people will, and there will always be those impulse buys, but how many songs will average person buy for their cellphone when they know they can get the same exact song for 99 cents at a regular online music store? Not to mention that they're almost definitely going to offer heavily DRM'd wireless downloads that you won't be able to copy to a PC or another device, making a $2 wireless download less
valuable than a 99 cent download.

Actually, we know why they think they can get away with it: they're probably going to cripple compatible phones so that you can't transfer music from a PC (Verizon already did this with the LG
VX8100, which can't play MP3s stored on the phone's miniSD memory card, at least not without a little hackery) and probably won't offer the serice at all on smartphones like the Treo or the PPC-6700. They're convinced that if wireless downloads are the only way to listen to music on your cellphone that people are going to pony up. Instead they're going to run into the same problem they ran into when they decided to lock down cameraphones in order to force subscribers to pay each time they wanted to email a picture to themselves or to someone else: most people just won't bother using the service at all.

[Via MocoNews]