14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has just announced the launch of BBM Music, a new BlackBerry Messenger service aimed at fulfilling the needs of socially connected music fans.
The new BBM Music has been launched as a cloud-based service aimed at enabling users easily discover music through the building of a community-based music library shared with their BBM Music friends.
The music library will continue to grow in size, as users will be able to select music from a catalog with million of songs from companies like Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI.
At the moment, the service is being launched in Canada, the United States and the UK in a closed beta trial, the mobile phone maker announced.
However, the BBM Music service should become commercially available for more customers before the end of the ongoing year.
The music service will be launched for BBM users with a monthly subscription of around $4.99 USD attached to it. However, the price will vary by country, and more info on this will be unveiled closer to launch date.
It should arrive in countries like: Australia, Canada, Columbia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, the United Kingdom and the United States.
BBM Music will make the music social through enabling music sharing and discovery, and will enable people keep track of the number of friends that are listening to the songs.
Moreover, the service comes with offline listening of songs, so that users will have the music on their smartphones while outside the coverage area. Users will have the possibility to listen to full tracks, RIM notes.
Other features of the new service would include:
- Build a personal music profile with 50 of your favorite songs. You can refresh your profile by swapping out up to 25 songs each month. - Invite your BBM friends to subscribe to BBM Music and to join your BBM Music Community. - With each friend that is added to BBM Music, you grow your music collection since the songs from the profile of each BBM Music friend are available to you at any time. - Up to 50 tracks from your personal profile are shared with your BBM Music Community, and each member of your community shares up to 50 songs from their profile with you. - Enjoy a truly social community-based music experience – the more friends who join your community, the more songs you can listen to. - Easily discover music that your BBM Music friends are listening to, and comment on your friends’ songs and playlists. - You can create multiple playlists from music in your profile as well as all of your friends’ profiles, and with one click you can shuffle the entire collection of music from your BBM Music Community. You can even see which friend contributed each song while it plays.
Users will have a BBM Music app at their disposal, through which they will be able to view recent updates from all users in their community, in a chronological order, with info on who added new friends, added or removed songs, playlists and comments.