Sounds Bad: BlackBerry Music Service Is Another Delusional Misstep for RIM

Technology Damon Brown 23/08/2011

If Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) gave up on webOS too fast and the PC too late, RIM (RIMM) seems completely delusional about BlackBerry's place on the totem pole. Case in point: RIM is expected to announce a BlackBerry-exclusive music service. Fine, but its walled garden approach and ridiculous limitations show how far gone RIM really is from reality.

For BlackBerrys only
The service, called BBMusic, will charge $5 a month for access to 50 songs. Those 50 songs can be shared with friends via the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service. The limitation is that the music can't be transferred onto your PC -- it can only be played on a BlackBerry device like your phone or your PlayBook tablet. Ditto for your friends.

So take [fill in the latest music service here], cap the music at 50 songs, and make it limited to one brand of device. And charge people $60 annually. As Peter Kafka, who broke the story at All Things D, put it:

So why would anyone pay $5 a month to get 50 songs on their phone, when they can pay $10 a month and get an unlimited number of songs, that work on lots of different devices, from services like Rdio and Rhapsody?


Exactly. The problems go deeper than the music service, though.

Your walled garden? No thanks
Basically, this is another delusional step on RIM's part. First, the PlayBook isn't exactly setting the tech world on fire: The also-ran just got dropped by Sprint (S) last week. Creating a pay-to-play music service that only lets you transfer to the PlayBook tablet isn't exactly going to bring on the teeming hordes.

Second, as my BNET colleague Erik Sherman also pointed out last week, RIM announced a cadre of new BlackBerrys costing $250 and up. As he put it:

By pricing the BlackBerry higher than an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S (which runs Android), RIM is effectively saying that it offers significantly more value that competitive models. Except that it doesn't.


In fact, a similar thing could be said for next month's BBMusic launch: Why would a consumer willingly pay for a service limited to BlackBerrys? Not only are there cheaper music services -- some free, in fact -- that are platform agnostic, but there's virtually no compelling reason to stay within RIM's walled garden. Even Apple (APPL), the king of walled gardens, supports iTunes on PCs run by its one-time main rival, Microsoft (MSFT).

RIM is expecting users to pony up the money based on brand name alone, which shows how disconnected it is from reality. And the reality is that both RIM and the BlackBerry brand are at an all-time low.

Best case scenario, RIM will recognize BBMusic as a bad idea and pull the plug quickly. Worst case scenario, it will become yet another albatross hanging around RIM's neck.

Photo courtesy of Lidal-K
Related:

  • RIM Going Down for the Second Time as Sprint Dumps the PlayBook
  • RIM Goes from Delusional to Self-Destructive with New High-Priced Blackberrys
  • HP Feels the WebOS Blues. Was Palm Worth the Money?
  • HP to Shuck PCs, Emphasize Software - Just Like IBM, Only Way Too Late

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