Service enables customers to tailor music to their tastes through its unique personalization ability.
Vodafone, the world’s biggest cell-phone company by sales said it had joined hands with Sony NetServices for the global roll-out of the world’s first fully convergent music service — Vodafone Radio DJ — offering interactive, personalized radio channels streamed to both 3G mobile phones and personal computers.
With Vodafone Radio DJ, customers have access to hundreds of thousands of songs, both current popular hits and back catalogue, from the world’s largest record companies, and many smaller independent labels. Customers can access streamed radio channels, bespoke collections, and channels defined by customers themselves, Vodafone said in a statement.
The British-based group, like many of its peers in the sector, is aiming to boost revenues as it looks to recoup billions of dollars of investment in third generation (3G) mobile services, as rising competition forces down the price of phone calls.
The key feature of Vodafone Radio DJ is its easy-to-use personalization system, which enables customers to "train" the pre-programmed radio channels to their own personal tastes by simply pressing a button to indicate "like" or "dislike" while listening to a song. If a customer presses dislike, the music skips to the next song, and Sony’s classification will ensure that subsequent radio channels would avoid songs similar to those rejected.
Through Sony NetServices’ detailed classification of each song in the catalogue — analyzing beat and harmonies as well as genre and mood — the radio channels that individual customers receive will feature more songs that have characteristics in common with songs that are liked, whilst avoiding songs with characteristics similar to those that the customer dislikes.
The Vodafone Radio DJ service consists of three elements:
Pre-defined channels: Customers can select a radio channel based on mood or genre. If the customer indicates that they do not like the song, the channel skips to the next track within the channel. Customers can also buy any songs that they like and these will be automatically available for download to their phone and PC.
Personal Channels: By rating songs on the existing radio channels, the customer can create a number of new, personal channels corresponding to their desired genres, moods or specific themes.
Collections: Vodafone Radio DJ also presents programmed collections of songs to the customer on mobile phone or PC. These collections will be created by local music experts around a theme eg. Christmas Hits or the Best New Hip-Hop, be updated regularly, and will comprise about 15 songs.
Vodafone said it would charge customers a monthly subscription for unlimited listening to music on both mobile phone and computer. There will be no extra charge to the consumer for the data traffic needed to deliver the music to the phone or PC.
Songs purchased on either mobile phone or PC will be available to download on both devices, with a separate high quality stereo copy being delivered individually to each. Personal settings and personal channels created on the mobile phone will also be accessible from the PC.
This is the beginning of a new era in portable music. This partnership with Sony will drive Vodafone’s strategy to become a leading global music provider. Vodafone Radio DJ is a revolutionary new way to discover personal music, anytime and anywhere, and we anticipate it will have widespread consumer appeal amongst our customers, said Lee Fenton, Director of Consumer Platforms at Vodafone.
Subscribers to Vodafone Radio DJ can listen to all the music they like, and discover new music to love. Vodafone Radio DJ opens a world of music discovery and listening pleasure on both the mobile phone and on the PC, said Robert Ashcroft, Managing Director Sony NetServices and Senior Vice President Sony Europe.
The company, which plans to initially launch the service in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal, said it would roll out the service to over 20 countries around the world over the year.