Support our non-partisan non-profit newsroom 💜 Donate now
Codebreaker

Launching on the defensive

Marc Sanchez Nov 3, 2011

BBM Music, BlackBerry’s music app, just launched. It lets paying subscribers download and play up to 50 songs. You heard me right – five-zero. Wow, 50 songs, that’s almost enough music to get today’s distracted, ADD hipster from the front door to the bus stop. The BlackBerry blog announcement starts off like this: “First, let’s clarify one misconception: with a BBM Music Premium subscription, you can access far more than 50 songs.” Okay, so you can get more than 50 songs? Great. How? Well, your friends, who must also be BlackBerry owners and pay for the new app, can send you their songs. As BlackBerry puts it, “let’s say you have 10 BBM friends with BBM Music subscriptions, and they each have 50 songs in their music profiles. From those friends alone, plus the 50 songs you downloaded to start your profile, you could have 550 songs in no time, right on your BlackBerry® smartphone!” Sorry, BlackBerry, but just because that sentence ends with an exclamation point doesn’t necessarily mean this is exciting. In layman’s terms BBM users can now friend the IT dude who is also stuck in a BlackBerry contract and listens to nothing but 70’s Genesis, King Crimson, and Yes.

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.