December 19th, 2008

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The iPod is dying off and in a few years it will be just a footnote in history. Hardware advances ensure mobile phones are destined to be the next generation MP3 player. There's one big obstacle holding back massive phone/MP3 migration and that is the difficulty of getting songs onto phones. A new mobile phone music search engine called Tuneroom will help remedy this shortcoming by making it easy to wirelessly load songs from the web to your phone. (Load2Mobile will wirelessly load your own song collection to your phone.)

I have a decent track record predicting music trends. When I was CEO of MP3.com we marketed the world's first portable MP3 player. It was called MPMan. From the first time I held the unit I knew this would change how people listened to music so I bought the first 100 units manufactured in the world and gave many of them away to early adopters of MP3. Later came Diamond Multimedia's Rio (which the music industry tried to get outlawed but failed). These pioneers laid the groundwork for Apple's iPod. Apple added a briiliant interface and smooth software making MP3 players a mass market item. (And no, Apple didn't create the concept of selling songs for a dollar each either - that title goes to a web site called NordicDMS.)

Advances in mobile phone software and hardware mean mobile phones are no longer simple communication devices. In fact they are now versatile enough to replace other devices. Mobile phones can even be superior to an iPod as an MP3 player. My current phone is the Nokia e71. For less than $30 I added an 8GB MicroSD and now have plenty of room to hold all of my music. (16GB cards are also available.) While not yet at Apple's ease of use level, the Nokia media player is much improved and this unit is small enough to slip in a pocket or go running with and it has exceptional battery life.

One deficiency of iPods is they have to be cabled to a PC to get updates of your music collection and this is one notable area where phones have an advantage. With the right services, mobile phones can be loaded with music wirelessly over wifi or the phone network. MP3tunes recently launched Load2Mobile where with a couple clicks you can send songs from your personal music library to your phone.

Tuneroom is a music search engine with a twist - it is designed to send songs wirelessly to your mobile phone. You can either browse Tuneroom from your PC and locate files to send to your mobile phone or visit the Tuneroom directly on your mobile phone's browser and select songs to load to your phone. In both cases songs you select are optimized for phone playback so they will load fast, yet sound good. Then they are sent to your mobile phone wirelessly so you can receive them as you travel around with no need to dock or cable your device. For the first time it's easy to sit at you desk or be on the move and send songs to your device from your own collection or from the millions of songs on the web.

There are more than 150,000 songs searchable at Tuneroom. You can search by artist or track. Since it's the holiday season why not have some free Christmas songs sent to your phone:

Angels We Have Heard On High by Sixpence None the Richer (A Classic with a hint of country)
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Jars of Clay (From the prolific and popular grammy award winning band)
What Child Is This? by Sherrie Keys (contemporary gospel, elegant voice)
Joy To The World by Tonic Sol-Fa (Acapella like you've never heard it)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

-- MR