Mobile media application developer mSpot wants to make it easer for people to manage music on their music-capable mobile phones. Instead of fiddling with memory cards, permissions, and side-loading music onto their devices, mSpot’s new Remix aims to provide mobile users with streaming access to their PC’s music and playlists.
Remix is client software that runs on a user’s mobil phone; uses a wireless carrier’s data network to connect back to a user’s PC and, thereby, provide access to every music track available for streaming and/or wireless synchronization. When a user plays a song using Remix, the software starts streaming the material automatically, while downloading the rest of the track (and the rest of the playlist!) in the background, storing teh data temporarily to the phone’s built-in memory card so the use has access to at least some songs even if he or she is not connected to the network. The basic idea is to make music-capable mobile phones remote front-ends to a user’s PC-based music collection in real time.
“With the announcement of the iPhone, Apple has validated that the future direction of mobile music is converged phone/player devices, and the race is on to grab share in what promises to be a multi-billion dollar industry,” said Daren Tsui, mSpot’s co-founder and CEO, in a release. “While there is no doubt that Apple will provide a great user experience on the iPhone, the reality is that there are already hundreds of millions of music-capable mobile phones in the hands of consumers. mSpot gives carriers a way to turn these phones into user-friendly, well-designed music devices that make it easy for consumers to discover, play and manage their music.”
Not surprisingly, mobile operators are probably thrilled at the idea of a mobile application which downloads significant amounts of data in the background, incurring most of those luscious data service charges the companies love so much. mSpot plans to offer Remix to wireless carriers as a service component; wireless operators, in turn, will offer Remix to end users, possibly under a different name. No word yet on when Remix might make it to mobile operators or consumers, what pricing it might carry, or whether it’ll support DRM-laden music from iTunes (doubtful) or in WMA format (more likely). But mSpot will be demonstrating Remix at the CTIA Wireless conference in Orlando beginning March 27.
