If there’s one thing missing from the iPhone competition, it’s the music. Samsung’s mobile, tablets computers, Blu-ray players, and TVs are all about to get access to millions of music tracks, thanks to Samsung’s Music Hub.
Launching on October 17, the new service will bring together music from the big four music labels – EMI, Universal, Warner, and Sony – as well as smaller independent labels. The initial service will start with three million tracks, but will grow heading towards the holiday season.
Unlike the iTunes store where you purchase your music and keep it forever, Samsung’s Music Hub will work in a similar fashion to Sony’s Music Unlimited service, allowing you to listen to any track you want by streaming it directly to your device for a monthly price.
“Samsung has worked closely with the major record labels to locally develop this service exclusively for the Australian market,” said Tyler McGee, Vice President of Telecommunications at Samsung Electronics Australia. “The era of cloud services is now upon us and has opened up an ideal connection between music and devices. Streamed music is a revolutionary step in the way we access music that‟s shaping music in much the same way as digital downloads did for CD.”
Samsung is also including a smart caching system for phones, synchronising desired music over WiFi to avoid 3G data charges, also known as “bill burn”.
The home theatre is being embraced here too, with TV being recognised as one of the primary ways of listening to music. With that in mind, Music Hub will bring across not just music, but also music videos. Unique to Samsung, the service will start with over 11,000 music videos, growing by 40-50 every week.
The Music Hub service will make itself available first on the Samsung Galaxy S2 handset, but will also be released for last year’s 7 inch Galaxy Tab in November and device from Samsung’s AV range in December, including Smart home theatre systems, Smart Blu-ray players, and Smart TVs. As for other Android devices, Samsung has no plans as of yet to release its Music Hub service to anything outside of the Samsung brand.
Not so sure about this. I have always been one of those who likes to own something, not loan it.