Company to offer music service on cell phones

Monday, Dec. 20, 2004 | 9:34 a.m.

For those annoyed by people who seem to have a cell phone constantly held to their ears, count your blessings. It is about to get worse.

Sprint will offer a new reason, besides placing calls, for people to use their mobile phones. It will introduce a radio service that allows people to listen to music over their phones, whether through an earpiece or the phone itself.

The service, which will cost Sprint customers $5.99 a month in addition to subscriber fees and any necessary upgrades in their choice of cell phones, will let them listen to commercial-free streams of music from channels including R&B/hip-hop, hit list, '80s, '90s, and a combined country and rock stream.

The release is part of an effort by Sprint -- aware of other services from its competitors -- to turn the mobile phone into an entertainment device. Already, some more expensive Sprint devices offer streaming video delivered over the mobile phone infrastructure.

In the case of radio, Sprint has contracted for radio channels from Music Choice, a company that also provides music programming over cable television networks.

Sprint is ratcheting up its programming as it hears the footsteps of potential rivals. It has taken the lead in creating video and audio programming to be streamed over phones, industry analysts said, but that lead may not last long. It is expected that in January, Verizon Wireless will introduce content to be streamed over its own mobile phone network.

In the meantime, Sprint said the new radio feature would enable users to have something to do with their phones in those increasingly rare moments they are not using them to talk, play games or send e-mail.

"This is for people who have a little bit of spare time," a Sprint vice president, Jeff Hallock, acknowledged.