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Sony Singing Apple's Tune

By Daisuke Wakabayashi

Sony’s music service is moving into Apple’s neighborhood. Sony’s subscription-based streaming music service, Music Unlimited, will be available as an app for Apple iPhones sometime this quarter. The app will also work on Apple’s iPad tablets although it won’t be optimized for it.

Sony’s decision to offer the service, touted as the Japanese company’s answer to Apple’s iTunes, on iOS devices speaks to Apple’s presence in the all-important smartphone and tablet markets as well as Sony’s willingness to do whatever it takes to expand the reach of its content services.

The Music Unlimited service, along with Sony’s video and videogame offerings, functions as the glue holding together the links between the Japanese conglomerate’s entertainment businesses and electronics products.

Sony said Music Unlimited, which debuted about one year ago, has more than one million “active” subscribers, but that figure includes people in trial periods. The system is two-tier with basic subscribers paying $3.99 to be able stream music from their own library or the service’s designated channels across a wide range of devices, premium subscribers pay $9.99 to stream from any of 15 million songs in the library.

Tim Schaaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment, said at a briefing with reporters at the Consumer Electronics Show that Sony decided to broaden the audience for Music Unlimited with the hope that it may bring consumers to Sony products down the road. He compared it to the same logic used by Apple to offer iTunes to personal computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

“You can be a Sony customer, but not every product you own has to be a Sony,” said Mr. Schaaff, noting that offering the service on Apple products does not limit Sony from creating exclusive advantages for users of the service on Sony hardware.

Sony also announced a new feature on Music Unlimited, which is already available as an application for Google’s Android operating system. Since it is a streaming music service, Sony will add a new feature this quarter so users will be able to temporarily store, or cache, playlists for when the online service is not connected to the Internet.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that users can already store or cache playlists when they are not connected to the Internet.