The Battle for On-Demand Music Services Moves to the Phone

The fight for unlimited and on-demand music services is heating up, and the battlefield has moved to the phone.

Mog, a California company that started a desktop-based subscription service late last year, unveiled on Monday a mobile application that will allow subscribers to stream or download music to their mobile phones.

Not to be outdone, Rhapsody, a longtime player in the on-demand subscription business, released a video over the weekend that shows an upgrade of its mobile app that would also allow music to be downloaded to the phone. Users of Rhapsody can now stream music to their device, but don't have a way to listen to the service without an Internet connection. Both applications are being designed for the iPhone and Android systems.

The Mog desktop service costs $5 a month, and David Hyman, the company's chief executive, said on Monday at South by Southwest that the mobile service would cost $10 a month when it becomes available in the second quarter of this year. The Rhapsody application costs $14.99 a month. Spotify, another streaming service that has created lots of buzz in Europe, has plans to bring its service to the United States this year.

As Brad Stone reported yesterday, the move to music in the cloud - whether through an on-demand subscription or an upload of a personal collection to a server - has not yet entered the mainstream, but many anticipate it will.

The labels might prefer that consumers upload their own music because the model in which people buy a song or album is more profitable for them. But at least two things threaten that path: the companies developing cloud music services want better licensing terms from the industry, and the servers storing the music need to work on any device, regardless of the company. Apple, he writes, "is likely to balk at letting people stream music to, say, Android phones."