AT&T Announces Napster Service

Earlier this week, AT&T announced a partnership with Napster geared towards making the most of the rapidly growing mobile entertainment business. The arrangement brings the nation’s biggest cellular carrier together with one of the best known distributors of digital content to – according to hopeful executives – complement traditional song downloads and generate a new stream of revenue.

The service allows AT&T customers to download songs directly, and wirelessly, to a cell phone. Napster’s catalog of over 5 million songs is the big consumer draw here; in addition, the company has experience managing music distribution, and will presumably provide an attractive user interface. Pricing is already established: $1.99 per individual song, or $7.49 for a month-long subscription good for five songs.

AT&T’s marketing and business development people believe there is a demand for instant gratification among mobile music fans, and are positioning this program as a more convenient alternative to “sideloading“. AT&T subscribers always had the ability to download music at home and transfer those songs to a cell phone; now, that process can work either way. When a song is downloaded through Napster Mobile, it can be automatically delivered to a home computer.