Cliq – music downloads for the terminally confused
Rating: rethink the business plan fast
by Tony Dennis
A brilliant idea ruined by its execution is
the only way to describe the new music download service -Cliq, from UBC Media.
Its initial appeal is enormous. Hear a track on the radio and then buy it
through your mobile phone. Marvellous. How convenient.
Now take a closer look at how this particular
transaction is executed. Most people will be cutting their wrists before the
actual track makes it anywhere near their mobile phone.
UBC might argue that I’m missing the point –
that this service isn’t really aimed at mobile phone users. But I don’t think
so. If you take the trouble to download a specialist application onto your
mobile phone, then surely it’s safe to assume that the content is actually delivered
to your handset? Obviously not.
So we end up with an amazing hybrid. A
music delivery service with which you interface by your mobile phone. But you
pay for it via a credit or debit card and it’s an extremely complex task to get
the actual track onto your handset. If at all. The track will most certainly be
downloaded to your PC and then stay there.
Worse still the logical owners of such content are people who already possess
MP3 players created for compatibility with Windows DRM. How many of those are
mobile phone users? Not many.
Quite frankly it’s the music industry shooting itself in the foot yet again.
The insistence on DRM makes it very difficult – but not impossible- to load the
content onto a playing device of your choice. Which should be a mobile phone,
of course.
To prove the point, I went onto the Net and found a converter which takes
Windows DRM protected .wma files - which
Cliq delivers- and then converts them to standard MP3 format. So why on Earth
bother to protect such content? At £1.25 a throw, you’re already making much
more profit than a sale through iTunes.
This service just doesn’t make sense to me
and hopefully by the time the announced hook up with the Carphone Warehouse
takes place in early 2008, most of these problems will be sorted.
At present, it is a service which excludes the
young and creditcard-less and delivers content to a PC not a handset. That’s
going to go nowhere very fast.
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