Vodaphone dump DRM

It's not just another staging post on the road to DRM-free music, but also a further blow to Windows Media Audio and Microsoft's attempts to lock in its unlovely format as music encoder of choice: Vodaphone is swapping from DRMed WMA files to unlocked mp3s for its mobile music store.

And in an even more surprising example of getting it right, if you've previously bought a DRMed song from the shop, you can swap it for a proper one, for free.

The irony, of course, is that if the original track didn't have DRM, you wouldn't be able to swap them. But then you wouldn't need to.

Candy nobody wants

Depending on if you're a Madonna is half-naked, or a Madonna is half-dressed sort of person, you might choose to react to the news that Vodaphone has got the rights to launch Madonna's new album a week early as an indication that Vodaphone has got more money than sense, or there wasn't much of a battle for the rights.

Vodaphone is creating a special portal on its Vodaphone Live mobile site (no, us neither) to host the track-by-track reveal:

Beginning on 21 April, one track will be released each day of the week and will remain live for 24 hours for download before it is replaced by the next track.

Again, you could see this as a way of building excitement across the week, or you could see it as a dribbly, ill-conceived idea that puts too much weight on some of the flabbier album tracks (and there will be some, we're sure). This is probably supposed to somehow frustrate piracy of the tracks, although removing all legal existence of track one on day two seems designed to create more, not less, illegal rummaging.

Tuesday's iTunes killer

Vodaphone is about to launch a mobile music store which is being touted as no sort of iTunes killer at all.

Oh, alright, it is:

Rob Lewis, chief executive of Omnifone, which developed MusicStation, believes the service will help operators exploit the full potential of their networks and the relationship they have with customers in a way that the iPhone does not.

"A device like iPhone, at the end of the day, ties a consumer to an Apple strategy forever. It does not utilise the 3G data network; it is not even 3G compatible. It does not allow over-the-air downloads; it only allows downloads from iTunes using a credit card, and it certainly does not allow unlimited downloads wherever you are," he said.

Analysts believe the iPhone will be a powerful, but niche, product, and the full potential of mobile music lies in making it easier to buy and play tracks on a mobile phone. This year alone, more than 1.13bn mobile phones will be sold worldwide, according to estimates from the industry expert Gartner, while 110m iPods have been sold since 2001.

This, of course, does rely on consumers being a bit... well, slow. Because otherwise, they might weight the "ease" of downloading on their handset against not actually owning the track - Vodaphone have gone with a rental model; not having the track on anything other than your phone; limited phone storage meaning that if you like more than a few hundred songs, you'll be constantly deleting, reloading, deleting, reloading and, of course, seeing through the pricing trick:

£1.99-a-week

Which sounds okay - although at £104 a year, you'd only start to see an advantage if you'd have bought more than 131 tracks on iTunes - but, of course, you also have to pay Vodaphone for the datatransfer as you suck these songs down. And at least when you sync your iPhone with iTunes, you can copy across anything you've ripped from CDs you already own.

Mobile music stores are built on the hope that customers are either very, very stupid, or very, very rich.

Urge to merge

It seems like just minutes since we were detailing the last iPod/iTunes killer service, and yet here we are with another one. Or, rather, three failed services hoping to pool their - uh - expertise to beat the heck out of iTunes and iPod. Unless it's already been defeated by GBox, in which case, they'll take on that and Zune.

The three partners are MTV and Real, who are merging MTV's unloved Urge and Real's solid-but-sidelined Rhapsody in a deal Verizon Wireless. VW is co-owned by Vodaphone, whose expensive Vodaphone Live content delivery flopped like a sky-diving whale back before we even knew there was an iPod to kill.

The hope is that heavy promotion by MTV will drive take-up, but why MTV's muscle should be able to drive sales to this new venture when it couldn't persuade people to feel the Urge isn't clear. Although since MTV doesn't actually carry much music, it's probably not the best platform to try and connect with music lovers on. If they were selling drawings of dwarves setting fire to themselves, they'd be counting the bucks.

Meanwhile, UK mobile phone companies will be casting a nervous eye at the FT's reports of a deal to bring the iPhone to Europe. In the UK, it's definitely going to be on the O2 network.