Music Ally

Until recently, mobile wasn’t really an option for any website offering streaming music. Mobile browsers fall over at the first sight of Flash, for example, and even the Safari browser on Apple’s iPhone doesn’t support it. Bad luck if you’re one of the mushrooming number of streaming music sites.

One answer is to make a mobile application, as Imeem has announced this week for Google’s Android platform, and Last.fm and Pandora have launched for iPhone. But even MySpace still doesn’t offer its streaming music features in its mobile applications, focusing instead on the less-taxing social networking elements.

I met a company called Skyfire today at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London who have a mobile browser that CAN access these sites.

So far it’s only available for a select bunch of handsets in the US, but the company has plans to expand both in terms of handsets, and geographically (for example, Skyfire should be available to Brits this side of Christmas).

Anyway, chief marketing officer Adam Sexton gave me a demo today, including its music aspects. That meant firing up Imeem’s website and using it, well, as you would on a PC. The browser is what’s called a ‘thin client’, in that most of the processing crunch to make websites readable on a phone is done on the company’s servers, rather than on the handset itself. Music sites, video sites, heavy Flash sites… they reckon it handles them all.

And it made me think: there’s a huge buzz around mobile applications at the moment, rightfully so because they’re the first real opportunity a lot of these streaming music sites have had to get onto phones. But as Skyfire shows, mobile browsers can and will be able to access these websites in their full-fat versions too. In a couple of years’ time, will browser-based music streaming be as popular on mobile as music applications?

Just a thought.

Tags: imeem, mobile music, skyfire

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.