Want free songs? Get AMPed

SINGAPORE, our iTunes moment may have arrived.

TNP PICTURE: MOHD ISHAK

We finally have SingTel's AMPed service.

It joins other music-on-your-mobile services like Nokia's Comes With Music and Sony Ericsson's PlayNow Plus.

But it is arguably the most promising replacement for a full-featured iTunes store that seems unlikely to reach our shores anytime soon.

Like PlayNow Plus and Comes With Music, AMPed has the very attractive proposition of letting users download songs for free.

But it holds only 500,000 songs, compared to Comes With Music (4 million) and PlayNow Plus (3.5 million).

You can access AMPed on your phone or on the web, as long as you are on one of SingTel's three 3G Flexi plans, or you've signed up for their $9.90 BroadBand on Mobile service on top of your existing plan.

You can download as many songs as you want. But SingTel allows you to permanently keep only 15 songs each month. The rest will automatically be made inactive. If you don't use all 15 credits, they will be rolled over to the next month.

A point to note here: The music is not in MP3 format, but in copy-protected Windows Media Audio format. It means you can play these songs only on a Windows media player.

Interactive space

Getting started with AMPed is a slight hassle.

Since it's meant as an interactive space for music fans, it's essential that you login from a computer and create your profile.

Once you've done that, you're all ready to browse music on your AMPed-ready phone.

The AMPed application, which takes just a few seconds to load, brings you a homepage with highlights of the day's top downloads and featured artists.

Downloading is a breeze and, at SingTel's 3G speeds, not too much of a hassle. Songs can be browsed by recommendations, artist, albums, genres and shared playlists. When you've made your selection, the song downloads in the background, while you continue to browse the store.

As part of its interactivity, SingTel allows users to keep and update profile pages, Facebook-style, with your current mood.

But at this stage, the interactive functions are mostly confined to the web portal. You can't create, edit and share playlists on your phone.

Another gripe is that, unlike iTunes, you can't download a whole album in one click. Songs must be downloaded individually, which can be frustrating.

But clearly, AMPed is not just a music download service. It integrates interactivity with music news and, as 2,000 lucky fans experienced last month with pop sensation Lady Gaga, opportunities to meet up with their favourite artistes.

I was particularly impressed with how the service responded to Michael Jackson's death.

They created a tribute playlist with old favourites like Ben, I Want You Back and I'll Be There - all ready to be downloaded into phones.

But this is also where AMPed showed its limitations.

Where was Thriller? Billie Jean? Or the rest of Jackson's later hits?

SingTel currently has only one music partner, Universal Music Group, which doesn't own the rights to Jackson's later works, which are on Sony's Epic Records.

With AMPed, there are no additional data charges for either browsing the store or downloading songs on the phone, unlike Nokia's and Sony Ericsson's services.

While AMPed is currently available to 11 handsets from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung, the telco is working to get the service as an application to more brands and models.

Enjoying Nokia's Comes With Music plan essentially means upgrading to a Nokia phone every year. Even then, only certain models come packed with the service. PlayNow Plus comes only with the W705 phone.

Once SingTel gets its music partnerships in place and the service is extended to more phones, who needs iTunes?