Subscription music services have been slow to start in Australia, but seem to be gaining traction. A month after Sanity released its much-delayed LOADIT service, Vodafone has entered the fray with MusicStation, a subscription music service for mobile phones which claims to offer more than a million tracks. After insllating the MusicStation app, selected tracks are downloaded to your phone for local playback; if the phone memory fills up, your least-played tracks are automatically deleted. The service is a fair bit cheaper than Sanity's rival service, costing $2.75 a week. There are no additional download charges, but you do already need to be a Vodafone customer, you can only access music in 3G areas, and you do need to be have one of the supported handsets (currently LG KU990 Viewty, Nokia 6121 classic, Nokia E65, Nokia N73, Nokia N95 8GB, Sony Ericsson C902, Sony Ericsson W880i, Sony Ericsson W890i, and the Nokia 6210 Navigator.) You'll doubtless have noticed the absence of the iPhone from that list -- despite Apple's players being the standard in the music market, it's apparently more or less impossible to get a commercial subscription scheme up and running on its devices. You could always try the Last.fm app, but that will chew through your download cap if you're not on a Wi-Fi network.

Tags: au | communicate | digital music | music | subscriptions