Is Phone Company's Plan to Turn Music Pirates Into Paying Customers "Game Changing"?

The customers of wireless provider Cricket Communications tend to skew toward the lower end of the income scale. Many have neither computers nor credit cards. Which means they've been left out of the iTunes revolution. As a result, some have taken to obtaining their music via file-sharing sites, often illegally, cobbling together an acquisition system that involves downloading tracks onto computers belonging to friends, libraries, or schools, then transferring the music to their phones. It’s not an ideal experience for the users. And it’s the opposite of ideal for the music industry. Which is why Cricket figured that if they could integrate a music service with their prepaid cellphone plans, they might be able to bring some of those pirates into the music-paying fold. And, of course, expand their own customer base in the process. Cricket is unveiling the fruits of those efforts at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. The new “Muve Music” service will be bundled into Cricket’s high-end wireless plan. For a flat $55 monthly fee, subscribers won't only get unlimited voice, text, and messaging, they'll also get unlimited access to the catalogs of Universal, Sony, Warner, and EMI.