Mobile phone for music on-the-go: Siemens expands music downloading service for Australia’s Telstra

Australian telecommunications service provider Telstra has commissioned Siemens Network to expand its “Music2You” (M2Y) music downloading platform for more subscribers. Now subscribers of the new “Telstra’s Next G™” UMTS network can download their favorite songs direct to their mobile phones — quickly and easily.

Siemens had already installed M2Y on Telstra’s network in November 2005, enabling selected UMTS subscribers to take advantage of the service. With the start of “Telstra’s Next G™” new 850 Mhz UMTS network in Australia, Siemens recently expanded the service for a larger customer base. Now M2Y works not only with UMTS handsets, but with all telephones that operate under the open Digital Rights Management (DRM) standard of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). OMA is a consortium of leading suppliers of mobile products and services. The so-called “OMA1 forward lock DRM” standard protects music files from illegal copying and is preinstalled on many mobile phone models, enabling Telstra to offers its music service to many more users.

M2Y is a music download platform for internet providers and mobile operators that enables them to offer their subscribers up to one million songs currently on their portals. The total number of songs is technically unlimited.

“Music is one of the applications our customers value and we are happy our subscribers can enjoy this experience through our range of music-enabled handsets,” explains Freddie Jansen van Nieuwenhuizen, Group Portfolio Manager Wireless Consumer Data Services at Telstra.

“The collaboration with Telstra underlines the customer-centricity of our M2Y service. Our technological platform is agnostic to multiple DRM systems, channels and content types, thus offering our customers total flexibility and convergence. Songs can be downloaded over the Internet or via a mobile handset,” comments Daniel-Rui Felicio, President of Carrier Services at Siemens Networks.

Music downloads from the internet are very popular. Many of today’s consumers are no longer willing to spend a lot of money for a CD with ten songs; instead they prefer to buy songs individually and make their own compilations. In the first six months of 2006 alone, more than eight million songs were downloaded from Siemens’s M2Y — up from slightly less than 80,000 in 2003, the year M2Y was introduced. Because of its large repertoire of currently one million songs, M2Y differs from the technology behind ring tone portals, which offer only a few hundred or thousand melodies. The data volume which the Siemens servers must handle is huge, and the sound quality of the songs reaches that of a CD.

What makes the whole system special for M2Y customers is also the fact that Siemens supplies not only the technology, but all associated services, which means that Siemens operates the entire platform. Using servers based in Zurich, Siemens currently supplies Internet and mobile providers in Europe, India and Australia. This setup enables them to focus on their end customers and not have to worry about technical and legal questions related to music downloads. And they also reduce their technology risk by depending on the well-oiled processes of Siemens.