Music Ally

This week saw the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, and one of the most interesting sessions involved DevelopIQ CTO James Shannon talking about his firm’s work on 7digital’s music store application for BlackBerry.

Having trousered a $100k prize earlier in the week in the BlackBerry Developer Challenge contest, he attracted a decent crowd to hear him talk about how DevelopIQ approached the project of making a music store for a mobile device.

“We’re trying to take mobile music on from where Apple left off, and get away from the PC or Mac-centric model for music,” he said. “I want to do everything on my BlackBerry, rather than sync, sideload or dock.”

Shannon also said a key aim was to combine the music store and music player in one app, rather than ape iPhone’s model of separate iTunes Store and iPod clients, which “don’t run at the same time or talk to each other”.

Interestingly, though, 7digital is apparently keen to bring its B2B model to BlackBerry, rather than just focus on its consumer app.

“If carriers and brands want to bring their brand to BlackBerry – if carriers want to have a music store with carrier billing – we want to make it very easy to do that,” he said. “We don’t want you to build music stores on your own, but instead take 7digital and put your brand on it. There’s a clear B2B strategy that wll see 7digital coming out with other brands on it, powered by 7digital.”

Shannon said DevelopIQ decided to focus on newer BlackBerry devices using version 4.6 and above of the BlackBerry operating system, rather than support earlier handsets – even popular ones like the old Curve and Pearl devices.

“Yes, it cuts us off from a large proportion of the existing BlackBerry market, but it’s important to get the user experience right,” he said. “We want to help RIM get people onto those newer handsets like the Storms and Bolds and those that will follow next year.”

Another key aspect of the 7digital BlackBerry store is the ability of other music apps to connect to it, in the same way that iPhone apps link up with Apple’s iTunes Store. Shannon said DevelopIQ worked hard to provide multiple ways for other BlackBerry apps to be able to link to 7digital’s store – which should include streaming music services. He didn’t mention Spotify, but we suspect if they launch a BlackBerry app, it would link to 7digital to match its desktop version.

What about streaming though – 7digital’s app is all about buying downloads and playing them on the BlackBerry, but could it evolve to more of a cloud-based service, streaming tunes?

Shannon was careful not to speak on behalf of 7digital, but agreed it is a possibility. “There is clearly a use case where I may have more music than I can fit onto my 16GB SD card, so may take some songs on my mobile, and leave some in my locker to play now and then,” he said.

Tags: 7digital, Blackberry, developiq

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 3:08 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.