Which Mobile Music Store is the Best?

I'm a big fan of the cell phone music stores, if only because I love to shop for virtual merchandise from music to animated screen savers when I'm stuck in line or at a boring meeting. Yes, each of the three stores—the Sprint Music Store, Verizon Wireless VCast Music, and Cingular Music—has some drawbacks, but I support the overall concept. Cathy Lu just wrote a brief roundup review of the top three for Newsweek.

Coincidentally, I also wrote a capsule review roundup of the top three in the January 25 issue of Rolling Stone, the one with James Brown on the cover. Alas, I keep forgetting to plug my own print articles in time for anyone to actually buy them. The James Brown issue may be on some stands still, but it's unfortunately not on the Rolling Stone site, so here's my basic take on the three main stores.

Though Cathy seems to really like the Sprint Music Store, which has 20 channels of Sirius for $6.95 a month (and the powerful new Sanyo M1, pictured), my favorite is for the Verizon Wireless VCast Music Store, mainly because it offers the option of buying songs for just 99 cents a pop on your PC first, then transferring them over to your PC (you can also download directly to your phone for $1.99, which is still cheaper than Sprint's no-compromises $2.50 per song).

To be honest, I also think Verizon's store has a better selection of songs, particularly of the indie and esoteric variety—I found stuff from Deerhoof, Of Montreal, Animal Collective, the Annuals (don't worry, I had never heard of them until I went to my local brick-and-mortar indie store, either). My one beef: Some albums are only offered in the "Clean" censored versions! So, the Justin Timberlake FutureSounds album I bought off of Verizon is censored! Also, downloading entire albums has to be done song by song on the phone, though you can do it with one click on the PC.

I love that Cingular lets you transfer subscription tunes from Napster, Yahoo! Music, and Rhapsody, but I'll take a pass on that service until it offers direct-to-phone downloads.

Anybody out there who buys tunes off these music stores want to chime in? Good and bad experiences are welcome.

Related links:

Cingular Music Store Sounds Like Good News