Known as the "AirAlbum", the application's most important features allow mobile-phone owners to preview samples of music and share them with their friends, legitimately and free of charge. The samples of songs are between 10 and 15 seconds long.

In an exclusive deal with Nokia, inTouch is launching its AirAlbum "mobile music catalogue" in seven of the biggest markets in the Asia-Pacific region - China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Thailand and Indonesia. The deal involves international and local music labels including EMI, SonyBMG, Universal, Warner, RS, and Platinum.

Nokia has pre-installed the AirAlbum application, loaded with 1,000 songs, in its N71, N80, N91 and Nokia 3250 handsets sold in the seven markets. Users are able to preview the songs for free, select the songs they like, buy the full versions from the handset.

Owners of new Nokia N70, N90, 6630, 6680 and 6681 handsets can acquire the songs from a CD bundled with handset package or distributed by Nokia for free, or by downloading them from the website www.AirAlbum.net.

"There are three things I believe people will like about AirAlbum," said Nokia (Thailand)'s managing director for customers and market operations, Bob McDougall.

 "First it is easy, intuitive and fun to use, secondly it allows peer-to-peer transfer of the application and its digital-rights-management-protected files, and lastly it is pre-installed in our easy-to-use Nokia mobile devices."

AirAlbum charges Bt30 for each full Thai song downloaded and Bt40 for international songs, a price competitive with iTune, which charges US$0.99 (Bt38) for each song.

However, iTune services are not yet available in many Asia-Pacific markets, including Thailand, partly because of low acceptance of online credit card payment, said inTouch's managing director Kendro Hendra.

AirAlbum, meanwhile, provides for payment by operator billing, through AIS, DTAC and TrueMove in Thailand.

Hendra said AirAlbum expects to gain a significant share of legitimate digital music downloads in markets where it operates. Nevertheless, he said, it remains to be seen how much the new application will help music companies overcome the problem of pirated music.

"Illegal music has the advantage that consumers can share full songs with their friends for free," Hendra admitted.

As a means to fight pirated music, inTouch is urging music labels to make new albums available first on AirAlbum, because unlike CDs, pirated music operators cannot copy from it for resale.

Unlike other online music stores, which require users to pay first before they can download a song, AirAlbum uses what it calls "separate delivery" technology.

This enables content to be preloaded or pre-installed via several channels, but they are still "locked", preventing playing of a full song until consumers decide to purchase the music and an activation key is sent to them in an SMS message.

"You can pre-load, download the previewed songs from the web, from CDs ... and you can do it offline, without having to pay for the streaming charges. But once you buy, then you pay," Hendra said.

There is no expiry time or limit on how many times users can listen to the music they purchase from AirAlbum. However, the full songs cannot be transferred to other handsets, meaning the music is lost if the user buys a new handset.

RS Promotion Plc's director of new media Vorapoj Nimvijit said one of the best benefits of AirAlbum was allowing people to promote the songs of their favorite artists.

"It's likely we will introduce a [new music] album exclusively for AirAlbum. We're preparing for this," he said.

Vorapoj said consumers have welcomed legitimate digital music downloads and, since the third quarter of last year when RS began offering full song downloads from its own online music store, "there has not been a single month in which the growth has been lower than 50 per cent."

Pichaya Changsorn

The Nation