AT&T Wireless Service to Name That Tune

NEW YORK (Reuters) - AT&T Wireless Services Inc. (NYSE:AWE - news) said on Thursday it launched a music recognition service that identifies songs for mobile phone customers, from a database of about 1 million songs.

When a customer presses #43 on any AT&T Wireless phone and holds the handset near a speaker, the company says it will send back a text message containing the title of the song playing and the singer's name for 99 cents, on top of call charges.

Richard Branson's youth-oriented wireless company, Virgin Mobile USA, said in March it was set to launch the same service for $1 a song this month. Virgin was not available to comment.

AT&T spokeswoman Danielle Perry said customers would get a message saying the song could not be identified if the sound was not clear enough, but said it was highly unlikely customers would receive incorrect information.

The service is provided by San Francisco-based Musicphone and U.K-based Shazam Entertainment, which operates the music recognition database. Posted by sugi_grl at April 16, 2004 03:55 PM