T-Mobile Unveils Stream-As-Much-As-You-Want Music Service

Author Tobi Stidolph Published June 19, 2014

Yesterday, at their Uncarrier 5.0 event, T-Mobile unveiled ‘Rhapsody UnRadio’, a new, premium music streaming app, available for iOS and Android, and on a browser developed with Rhapsody that is free for unlimited data customers on T-Mobile, and $4 a month for all other T-Mobile subscribers.

The T-Mobile music announcements represent Uncarrier 6.0, following up on T-Mobile’s Test Drive News. These moves are part of the carrier’s plan to shake up the wireless industry, and try to gain new customers and more market share. T-Mobile is the latest firm to embrace music streaming, and hopes that its take on the service will help it stand out from the big competitors.

UnRadio by T-Mobile follows a wave of music-related announcements by different carriers recently. Sprint hosted a music-themed event last month, where the carrier partnered with Harman Kardon to introduce the audio-optimised HTC One M8 Harman Kardon edition. Sprint also collaborated with Spotify to offer a discounted music service to new customers, with added discounts for subscribers joining the Family Plan.

T-Mobile thinks that it has a competitive edge with their data offer. Any T-Mobile customers listening to Pandora, iHeartRadio, Slacker, iTunes, Spotify or Rhapsody won’t see the data usage counted against their contract plans. T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in an interview that one of the main customer concerns of streaming music is that the streaming would eat into their data caps.

A T-Mobile customer poll on Facebook is underway for customers to vote for which other services they think should be included. Google Play, Beats Music and Rdio are also being considered.

Although smaller services like Rhapsody are often overlooked by the public eye, mainly due to large companies like Spotify, Beats Music, iTunes, Google Play and Amazon, they have focused on growing overseas, and through mobile carriers and telecom partnerships like this new one with T-Mobile.

Paul Springer, Chief Product Officer of Rhapsody said, “We set out to create the world’s best Internet radio service, and with UnRadio, we’ve succeeded.”

UnRadio Rhapsody customers on the T-Mobile network will be billed directly as part of their existing contract, but the service will be available to any other user. The price to everyone else is $5 a month.

The service let’s users stream as much music as they want withOut being interrupted by ads. They will be able to mark favourite songs and save songs. They will also be able to download songs for offline listening. Rhapsody currently has 32 million songs. There is also a radio option ghat allows users to choose local radio stations.

UnRadio has one really awesome feature; TrackMatch. TrackMatch allows users to user Rhapsody to identify songs player at a bar or on a TV, etc, and create a station around that song. You can also save the song. It’s basically Shazam, but better.

There is yet to be a release date for this service for T-Mobile customers in the UK however.