AT&T and eMusic charging a fortune for mobile songs

AT&T and eMusic announced that they are going to be partnering to allow AT&T customers to directly download purchased songs to their mobile phone. The songs will be from the eMusic catalog of over 2.7 million tracks. eMusic's catalog is mostly made up of independent artists but there is some mainstream stuff such as Paul McCartney and The Pixies.

The tracks that you get are not any different than the ones you can buy at eMusic directly. You are paying for the convenience of the mobile download.

Currently, eMusic charges $9.99 for 30 tracks which is about $0.33 per track. For the added convenience of downloading the song directly to your mobile device, they will charge you $7.49 for 5 tracks which is about $1.50 per track! That's more than iTunes or almost any other online music download service.

It seems that AT&T is taking their ringtones business model and trying to apply it to full tracks. AT&T charges $2.49 for a 30 second ringtone sample (at low bit quality and cropped in a place you probably didn't want). That business has done quite well for them the past couple of years so they must think that "getting the whole song for less is a bargain."

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why would eMusic be doing this? I understand that Apple's failure to include a direct music download service on their iPhone is a huge missed opportunity but charging more than iTunes for a mobile download?

iTune's prices are already too high compared to the market's perceived value of a digital file and eMusic isn't offering anything new. Expect AT&T and eMusic to be disappointed with the results of this collaboration. Its just not worth it.