3 in negotiations with Spotify

Phone operator working on streaming music deal?

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5 August 2009 15:22 GMT / By Duncan Geere

According to New Media Age, streaming music wunderkind Spotify is in "advanced negotiations" with phone network 3, in order to distribute its mobile application to 3's 4.4 million subscribers.

That's all well and good, except that 3 doesn't have any Android handsets or the iPhone - the two platforms where we know Spotify is working on mobile software. So could this be an S60 application? Or even a Java one?

A source apparently close to the negotiations said: "Conversations are taking place and we're hopeful. It might be hard for Spotify to find a fit with another operator because of its existing commercial agreements, such as O2 and Apple". Spotify only said that it's talking to "a range of partners in the UK".

Orange recently launched its "Monkey" service where you can listen to free music from Universal artists over the operator's voice network. Spotify has also submitted an iPhone application to Apple, and is awaiting approval.

Update: Pocket-lint contributor and mobile developer Andrew Spode Miller commented: "Android uses its own form of Java, so I don't think it would be a stretch of the imagination to see Spotify ported as a standard J2ME application. On some of the slower, run of the mill 3 handsets, you might notice the performance overhead - but time will tell if it's a deal breaker".

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