Elites TV is reporting that Napster and NTT DoCoMo has announced a partnership to allow DoCoMo iMode customers who are also member’s of Napster’s service to access music via their phones. Their new service called Over The Air (OTA) will be rolling out when the 904i phone is available in the market.

Napster’s new OTA subscription functionality will be available to DoCoMo’s customers as an extension of the Napster To Go service at no additional cost and will be available to both new and current Napster To Go customers.

This is an interesting twist to the mobile music market because up to this point only wireless providers have been offering singles sale services. The Cingular or Virgin offerings allow you to buy a song at an extreme premium that is then download and store it on your phone. With the new OTA, the song is streamed down as requested and then more then likely thrown away when done listening. With this functionality and the ability to create playlists on your PC, that you can access via the phone, you have in a sense an on demand XM radio that allows you to have unlimited access to music as you move around. Storage no longer becomes an issue only access to the network.

Of course, only Japan (and probably South Korea) has this kind of high bandwidth and full country network coverage for this technology to make sense. But as other carries get their networks fleshed out in other countries you can bet that this kind of service will become more prevalent.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 10:49 am and is filed under Business Models, Digital Music Industry, Distribution, Music Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.