Germany: T-Mobile to launch Spotify flatrate for mobile customers
To stream music on your mobile phone, you not only need a phone capable of doing so, but also a fast enough connection to make the experience enjoyable, and a sharp eye on your phone's data usage if you plan does not include unlimited data transfers, or if you are automatically limited once you reach a certain threshold. While you could limit the music streaming to times when you are connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, it is limiting your experience as well. Some services allow you to store music temporarily on the device so that you can listen to music while you are on the go.
Germany provider T-Mobile announced a new cooperation with the Spotify music streaming service today that provides T-Mobile subscribers with an option to listen to streaming music for as long as they want without having to pay attention to the phone's data usage.
T-Mobile will first introduce a new mobile subscription plan in October that includes a Spotify Premium subscription and all the benefits it provides, including ad-free music, offline access to music and improved music quality.
Existing T-Mobile customers furthermore get an option to add Spotify Premium to their subscriptions near the end of the year. The new plan will be available for around 30 Euros, the addon for about 10 Euros. The price for the add-on is the same that Spotify Premium users pay when they subscribe on the Spotify website directly.
So what's the real benefit of this over subscribing directly at the Spotify website? T-Mobile subscribers do not have to pay for data transfers when they stream music, as it is included in the subscription. Instead of having to monitor the data usage while using Spotify on their mobile phones, subscribers can now listen to music for as long as they want without first checking their remaining data capacities or the available connection methods.
The offer should be interesting to existing Spotify Premium subscribers who are also T-Mobile customers, as well as other users who would like to stream music to their mobile phones.
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Well my first question would be how the t-com will differ between regular data traffic and spotify traffic.
Another aspect which will be important is what will become of the music you downloaded when you end your subscription. As far as I know itunes and napster had in their terms of usage that the downloaded titles were only als long legally owned as the subscription lasted.
Where did you find the price of around 30€? Couln`t find that on the t-com website.
If it`s a per year subscription price I guess for the majority of mobile users the use of regular mobile music software to listen to webradio/streams should do the job as well.
Rather spend the 30 bucks for higher data traffic rate.
But this assumes my guess about ownership of the downloaded music is true
As far as I am concerned I still favor the good old CDs.
If I want music on my mp3 player or mobile I have no problem spending a few minutes to encode them to mp3.
The 30 Euros are a monthly payment and for the whole phone subscription. T-Mobile did not reveal what its included though, so can’t say anything about included flatrates and data rates.
It is relatively easy to distinguish between traffic sources, so that should not be a problem.
As with other streaming services, you only buy a right to use, not to own.