Unlimited "Free" Music for Phones — for a Price

Just think: free, unlimited music downloads on your phone, from all four major labels. What's the catch? You might pay more for your handset up front, and after a year, you'll have to pony up for more music.

The MusicStation Max service, announced this week by U.K. wireless music provider Omniphone (and duly reported by CNET), sounds enticing—and familiar, come to think of it. Nokia was touting its "Comes with Music" unlimited-downloading service back in November, while Universal Music has been toying with the idea of a free downloading service for portable music players.

Anyway, here are the details for MusicStation Max: buy a new MusicStation Max-compatible phone (LG says it's on board, with other manufacturers expected to follow suit), sign up, and you'll get free, unlimited music downloads for anywhere between a year and 18 months. After that, you'll either have to pay a fee (unspecified for now) to keep getting free tunes, or break down and buy a new MusicStation Max phone for more free music. Also: the DRM-protected music you get via MusicStation can't be burned to CD, although songs will be playable on your PC.

Oh, and another thing. As with Nokia's "Comes with Music" program and the Universal Music deal, the music isn't entirely free—in fact, the tunes will be subsidized by the phone manufacturers, who will presumably pass along the cost to...well, you. How much more you'd actually be paying for a MusicStation Max-enabled phone is still up in the air.

The MusicStation Max plan has a big advantage over the proposed Nokia and Universal Music services: namely, deals with the four major music labels (Nokia only has Universal Music signed, and the last we heard, Universal Music had just itself and Sony BMG on board.) But there are some important question marks too, including whether Omniphone, which has yet to offer music downloads in the U.S., would consider coming Stateside.

Still, the free-DRM'd-music-except-for-the-subsidy idea seems to keep coming back, and I'd be surprised if we didn't see some version of it—either from Omniphone or another provider—in the U.S. at some point. The real question, of course, is how much more we'd have to pay for these phones. $20? $50? $100? Considering that a year's worth of subscription tunes from Rhapsody goes for about $150, I'd think the markup would have to be well south of that mark.

What do you think—would you pay extra up-front for unlimited tunes on your phone? And how much would be too much?

Full disclosure: My lovely and talented wife happens to work for Sony BMG—not that Sony BMG plays a big part in this story, but still, just throwing it out there.

Related:
Unlimited free downloads on new phones [CNET News.com]