New Verizon V Cast Music service is easy to use

January 19, 2006|By Eric Gwinn, Tribune staff reporter.

Verizon Wireless on Monday unveiled its V Cast Music service, letting customers download songs to their phones, their PCs or both simultaneously for $15 a month plus a fee per song.

I like the service. It's easy to use and reasonably priced. Verizon customers who have V Cast-ready phones can use them to buy and download songs directly from V Cast over Verizon Wireless' broadband network, but the music costs $1.99 per song that way. The download puts one copy of the song on the phone and sends a higher-fidelity copy to the buyer's PC. If you're a V Cast subscriber, you also can download songs at 99 cents each to a Windows XP-based computer and then, if you wish, copy your songs from the computer to certain Verizon music phones -- the LG VX8100 or Samsung a950 -- at no extra cost. Verizon says more V Castready phones are coming this year.

To use the service at all, you have to subscribe to Verizon Wireless' $15-a-month V Cast package. That lets you download music (and TV shows and music videos) from big music labels Warner Music Group, EMI, Universal and Sony/BMG, as well as indie provider the Orchard. V Cast offers no podcasts or audiobooks.

Verizon isn't the first wireless provider to jump into the music download business. Sprint launched a music service Oct. 31, charging $2.50 to download a song from its 300,000-title library to a computer and to a Sprint Power Vision-ready phone: the Sanyo MM9000 or the Samsung a920.

Both companies are trying to tap into the hunger for portable devices that do all sorts of things. Thanks to competition, there's a limit to how much a wireless provider can charge for plain old telephone calls. Selling ring tones already is popular, and some wireless companies have spent billions on upgrading their networks, pinning profit hopes on subscribers sending text messages, camera-phone pictures, video, music and other data. Offering music downloading fits right in.

While music phones may not spell the end of the portable music player, the fact that Verizon is charging 99 cents for a song is significant, says Albert Lin, telecommunications analyst for American Technology Research.

"Those hoping for the price of digital songs to rise toward the prices paid for ring tones are out of luck," Lin said. "Some hoped it could rise from 99 cents, $1, to the $2, $3 or $4 paid for ring tones. That's not going to happen."

Neither Sprint nor Verizon Wireless allows parents to limit the number of songs their kids can buy, but they can use a computer to keep track of how many songs have been purchased.

I tried V Cast Music with the latest LG VX8100 phone while I was riding on the bus. First, I listened to a 20-second preview of "Wishing," by A Flock of Seagulls (which took about 5 seconds to load). I decided I wanted it for $1.99, pressed the "Buy" button, and it took about 30 seconds to download the song.

Listening to it through headphones connected to the phone, I thought the song sounded OK even though it's not as high-fidelity as the copy sent to the computer. (For those who'd like to know, the phone's songs are compressed at a sampling bit rate of 64 kilobytes per second; the computer's files have a 256 kbps bit rate.)

The LG phone can store 10 megabytes of files -- that's three or four songs -- but you can buy 2 gigabyte storage cards that hold about 500 songs.

Each music file stored on the phone is encoded in Microsoft's new Windows Media Audio Pro format, which compresses music to half the size of a song file shrunken with the regular WMA format. Songs I listened to in WMA Pro format sounded good enough but seemed to lack a little bass.

Checking the difference

When I got off the bus and fired up my computer at home to check my V Cast library of music, a high-fidelity copy of "Wishing" was waiting for me. I wouldn't say it sounded four times better than the phone version of the song, but there was more stereo separation, more bass, more presence.

You have to use Windows Media Player 10 to go to the V Cast Music store and choose from among 500,000 big- and independent-label songs.

Verizon promises another 500,000 songs will be available by spring, but its catalog still would be less than half that of the iTunes Music Store.

One feature I like: Once V Cast music is downloaded to the computer, you own it and you can copy it to any Microsoft Plays For Sure-approved digital audio player without changing the format. I can't say the same for every music subscription service.

V Cast Music and the LG VX8100 phone worked well together.

As I played the songs with the phone open, I used the directional pad to move to the next song or to listen to the previous one. When I closed the clamshell-style phone to put it back into my pocket, the song paused a second, then resumed. The phone's cover has buttons that let me skip or pause songs without reopening the phone. When a call comes, the song stops playing. After I answered the call, the tune picked up where it had been interrupted.