Ouch. You have to wonder why anyone would buy songs on their mobile but then again there's plenty of stupid people out there that pay for ringtones that would jump at the chance to pay 2-3 times the price of the regular iTMS songs.

Surely it's not in Apple's interests to let carriers run WMA only music download sites, even expensive ones.

Veeery interesting. Its a battle between two unlike eco-systems: The iTMS-iTunes-iPod-Phone vs. a Operator-WMP-Phone one.

There is no reason for the operators not to get involved unless they can make money on it. Since iTMS barely is making money for Apple directly and they even have the benefit of being the largest one out there this means more expensive tunes (probably downloaded to the phone).

Besides it will propably be phone centered in contrast to Apples computer centered solution. What if you want to burn the song you bought on your phone? Then you have transfer it to the computer first and then burn it. The same goes for transfer to other players, you have to go over the computer first. Two steps all the time.

I really donīt see any realistic business plan in this one. It sounds like yet another pie in the sky the operators think they can grab. I have seen it over and over again: First they thought WAP would cash in, then they thought operator provided SMS service (like where is the nearest pizzaria) would fill their pockets. And lately they thought video-telephony via 3G would be the killer app and it has failed. The only real succes beside talk have been SMS and that caught most operators by surprise...

It will be interesting to see which sells more.

They can charge 2-3 dollars per song for a Windows media phone.

Sounds assinine, but people are doing it. The music industry makes more money off of music ringtones than they do through CDs or legal downloads.

This is a push by both the cellular providers and the recording industry to make more money.

An iTunes phone means I can transfer CD's I own to my phone, not everyone is using the music store.

Good luck selling that WiMPy phone, Motorola.

Data transfer still costs @ $2/mb and the song ends up on a frigging phone. There is NO benefit for the consumer in this. Perhaps the customers will try it a couple of times and when they realise it sucks hard with a vengeance (the price) they will leave it.

The only succesful music service I have seen is a $8/month service at one of the 3G operaters here. It gives you 100 hours of crappy video and "radio" stream to your phone from 40 radio and 8 video streams plus the ability to download 10 videos to keep on the phone per month. But nothing of it leaves your phone and since they have just above 10 customers after being on the marked a couple of years they have all those vacant cells sitting there with nothing else to do. Any succesful operator without tons and TONS of surplus airtime would demand marked price for the data transfers.

"The phone is also not popular among wireless operators because they cannot sell and transfer songs directly to the phone due to the closed iTunes system. "

people want what they dont understand, until they use it, get ripped off, and then go back to what is good.
anyone who buys a song on their phone, pays airtime for the download plus the 2-3 bucks per song has something very wrong with them.