Thumbplay Adds Full Track Downloads - Subscription Required

Thumbplay, a popular mobile content merchant, announced today that they have added full track downloads to their content offerings, putting them in direct competition with Apple, Amazon.com, Real and others who sell MP3's.

Thumbplay has traditionally been focused on ringtones but as devices have gotten better they've continued to add new content types including video and now full track songs.

The press release is a little misleading, however, because the songs are really not $.99 each. You must become a Thumbplay subscriber at $9.99 a month which gets you 10 credits to use in the store. Each product has a certain number of credits and the full track songs are each one credit so theoretically, you could get 10 full track downloads for $10 a month.

It will be interesting to see how successful this offering is. Most people in the digital music retailing space know:

A) How hard it is to make money with the royalty structure presented by labels.
B) Consumers have not flocked to subscription services. (The a-la-carte model that Apple offers is by the far the most popular.)

I wanted to demo the service today but I have no interest in subscribing to their monthly "club". If anyone else has used it, let me know and we can provide a review.