RIM announces new $5 BBM Music service focused on the social experience
![matthew-miller](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/fc17e8c1041353fda869aa6a774cae7eff8e2b3d/2022/08/05/ee87d915-3bf6-40cb-8e7f-6112d3b322bc/matthew-miller.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&frame=1&height=192&width=192)
As a person who has a small music collection and enjoys music discovery, check out my Streaming Music Showdown feature, I will be paying for this $4.99 monthly service as soon as I can. I would love to see a study that looks at "unlimited" music services to see how many different songs people actually listen to and my experiences and conversations with people lead me to believe it is not as large of a number as you might think. I am scheduled to receive a beta invite to start testing out this new music service tomorrow when the service is activated as a private beta. If you have a BlackBerry smartphone and are interested in testing out the service, follow me over on Twitter and I will give out beta invites that RIM sends my way.
This new BBM Music service is not piggybacked on any existing service and was worked out with artists and labels by RIM and is a RIM service. It will launch tomorrow as a closed limited beta in the U.S., Canada, and the UK and will launch in many more countries by the end of the year, including Australia, Columbia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, and the UAE.
As stated in the press release, here are the key features of BBM Music:
- 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.
- Within your BBM Music app, you also see a visual timeline that shows the recent updates of all users within your community. It gives you a chronological view of community updates, including who added new friends, which songs were added or removed, which playlists were created and what comments were made by your BBM Music friends.
- Listen to Full Tracks - BBM Music subscribers can listen to full tracks from their friends? profiles – not just previews.
- Offline Listening - Music can be saved to smartphones for offline listening, allowing users to access songs even when they don?t have wireless coverage.
- Topping the Charts – Keep track of how many friends are listening to your tracks.
This is a unique service and it seems RIM may have figured out a good way to optimize the music and social experience. I look forward to trying it out and if you are interested follow me on Twitter and let me know you want an invite to the service. I have been using Slacker Radio on the BlackBerry devices for a couple of weeks, but at half the price and a lot more social integration it is highly likely I will be moving to BBM Music.