A-penny- a-track music listening enabled by Bango

Partners with Psonar for pay-per-play mobile music service

A radical charging model for listening to streamed music has become viable through the alliance between payment specialist, Bango and Psonar the music streaming service. Consumers will be able to listen to a track that they don’t own for just one cent (or one eurocent) per play. This model doesn’t even depend on intrusive advertising to achieve this price level. And it can be extended to other areas of digital content.As Anil Malhotra, senior vp for marketing with Bango, explained, “The Bango payment platform has supported super-micro level charging for a long time.

This has the potential to revolutionise digital content consumption especially where pricing has become a barrier to ubiquity.”

Psonar’s pay-per-play service enables users to ‘gift’ tracks or whole playlists to their friends and relatives.

Each play is still charged for – meaning record labels and artists are assured of revenue for every single use of the content.

There’s a bit of a catch, however. Initially Psonar’s service will only be available via desktop PC or HTML5 enabled phones. [We're struggling to think of any current  HTML5 handsets].

No worries because BlackBerry and iPhone apps are due for launch in Q1 2011. Apps for the other major smartphone platforms will follow after that.

Confusingly, Psonar then says it is launching pay-per-play in Q2 2011 across Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and Scandinavia with North America targeted for later in 2011.

So the iPhone and BlackBerry apps will be out in time, then?

The pair claim that Psonar’s use of the super-micro level charging feature for music can be extended into other areas such as video, gaming and similar digital content.