Sony Music on Wednesday partnered the new range of Xperia smartphones for music service that allows consumers to download and stream music from the Sony Music Catalog of two million songs.

This service will be free for the first six months from the date of purchase and consumers can then opt to subscribe to it after the period.

Called ‘Sony Music Jive’, the company will look at innovations like premiering content exclusively for Sony Xperia customers for streaming and download and the first one will be a single from the soundtrack of the movie Ek Thi Daayan featuring Emraan Hashmi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Huma Qureshi and Kalki Koechlin with music by Vishal Bhardwaj.

“Indian consumers are very passionate about music and we feel this compelling service will be a huge reason for customers to choose our new range of exciting Xperia smartphones,” Kenichiro Hibi, Managing Director, Sony India, said.

Sony Music Jive has access to 100 years of music ranging from iconic and pop artists such as Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Aerosmith, Bob Dylan, Micheal Jackson, Santana, AR Rahman, Shakira, Beyonce, Keisha, Pitbull, KK and Lucky Ali, to name a few.

Apart from new range of Xperia smartphones, the service will be available for other operating systems and integrated with operators so that all consumers can avail themselves of this service, the company said.

“Sony Music Jive is our foray into directly engaging with consumers by offering them a compelling digital music service. We have been doing a number of digital innovations and the launch of this new hybrid application is another such,” Shridhar Subramaniam, President India and West Asia, Sony Music, said.

New service

The service is being powered by technology partner Infibeam Digital Entertainment, a music tech start-up formed by Infibeam, an e-commerce company and the service uses cloud platform to provide quick experience.

Users can browse through multiple genres — pop, rock, reggae, hip hop, country, classical, dance, Indian regional, Bollywood and download to keep, create a playlist or just listen on the go.

The songs can be downloaded in MP3 format with variable and adaptive streaming technology at 128kbps MP3 downloads, the company added.

>ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in

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