Music with a ring to it

Telecommunications Americas, April, 2004 by Jim Barthold

It happens all the time. You hear a song in the airport, train station or bar and it gets stuck in your head. Even more annoyingly, you don't know the title or artist.

MusiKube promises some relief--although it won't get the song out of your head--for cell phone-equipped callers with a hankering to know.

With MusiKube's iCapture mobile music recognition service, music lovers can dial an 800 number and hold the microphone to the music source for about 10 seconds. iCapture then looks up the relevant information on MusiKube's database, calls back and texts the song title, artist and album information along with "a follow-on message with a temporary password and the URL to our Web site where you can go, log on with your phone number and create a profile," said Sunjay Guleria, MusiKube's marketing vice president.

The profile would be kept in MusiKube's memory and include a history of everything that the caller has identified through calls to the service.

"You might not be interested in buying anything immediately, or you might want to find out more about the music or get the ring tone or other components," said Guleria.

MusiKube makes money by selling the music; its partners make money in other ways, including, for the carriers, charging for the premium SMS and mobile airtime.

"We have to work with a lot of different people in the value chain," Guleria said. "We have agreements in place with all the GSM networks and we're working to shore those up with Verizon and Sprint as well. We're working with the record labels," he said.

It's easy for the music listener to spend money. "There's a buy button that I can click through and get the digital download, get the CD downloaded to a PC. There's also a recognition button that will link to other albums and other songs that I may like based on my personal profile," Guleria said.

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Since it's infeasible to download music to a cell phone, the information is sent to the caller's PC e-mail "simply because that's where the majority of people play back their music," he said.

While obviously a moneymaking scheme, the mobile music recognition service is intended to sate the public's appetite for audio entertainment.

"If people are exposed to music, why not make it easy for them to play it?" Guleria asked. "Why make them remember it and write it down?"