Review - BBM Music

You've all heard about BBM, the instant messaging on BlackBerry.  Heaven knows, I’ve written about it enough!!

Recently, the people at RIM launched BBM6, the instant messaging with social interaction built in. 

Now they've launched BBM Music, a way to share and discuss your musical tastes with your BBM friends.

I've been testing this for the last week, and must admit that, although I am completely (almost) out of touch with the latest toons, this is a great way to listen to favourites, and discover new 'sounds'.

It's very clever. Once you've launched the app, you can start to select your music from a catalogue of millions.  The major music labels are on board, so there's plenty to get you started.

Next, find people who have shared music; it all feels a little lonely at first, but there are soon people inviting you to 'add them'.  This is a separate list from your standard BBM contact list (although you can become BBM friends too).

You have the ability to add comments to individuals, either to congratulate them on their musical taste, or anything else.

Since it runs in 'the cloud', nothing is stored locally, although your music selection is cached to your SD card, meaning you can listen in areas of poor coverage.

You can select up to 50 tracks in your own library, but multiply that by your contacts, and you could have limitless amount of music.  Of course, if a contact removes a track, you will also lose access to it, unless you add it yourself.  I guess that helps keep the selection fresh.  It works both ways of course, so I can change my selection at will!

The idea is, that once you have allocated your 50 tracks, you can swap up to 25 of them each month; meaning that after 2 months, you can have a completely new set of music.

So, you can listen to your own selection or listen to the selection from all your contacts. At the time of writing, I have over 410 tracks at my disposal; and growing.  Now, I admit that they won’t all be to my taste; but it sure is fun listening to new and undiscovered (by me) music.

Currently, the service is in Beta testing (which is the final phase before general release) and during this time it isn't costing me anything; however, there is talk about a £5 / month charge for this service.

Would I pay for it? 

It’s cheaper than Spotify (for which there is no BlackBerry app anyway!) and whilst I don’t own the music, at just 17p/day I get access to tons of music and I can renew and refresh as I want.

It's also a lot of fun....