UK retailer Carphone Warehouse has announced a deal with music label EMI to launch Robbie Williams’ next album on an MMC card, in addition to the standard online and CD release, specifically for use in mobile phones and PDAs. Not only will it have versions of all the songs, but it will also have video content as well. Carphone Warehouse intends to launch even more albums on its new mobile brand ‘playmobile,’ including combo cards that have both songs from artists and ringtones and wallpaper (OMG it’s Robbie’s half-exposed bottom again!) from the same artist.
Here’s the thing, though: they never mention what DRM is going to be used to lock down the songs, and you know they’ve got something in there to restrict them or else they’d not be so willing to share them in digital form. And since it’s unlikely that every platform that has an SD/MMC card slot will be able to use the DRM player, these will probably be of very limited use. Getting extended content features is nice, but not if you can only use it on a handful of devices. Of course, I’d love to be wrong and discover they’re selling MMCs full of unencumbered MP3s.
Press Release [CPWPLC via Mobile-Weblog]
