Expected to launch later this year, initially in the US only but with other countries on the roadmap, BlackBerry Music is a social music service integrated with BlackBerry Messenger that allows you to discover and share music with your friends and contacts.
BBM Music has been designed to allow you to:
- Build your music profile from a catalogue of millions of tracks (with more to be added over the coming weeks)
- Invite friends to BBM Music from your BBM contacts and gain access to their music and share your music (once they subscribe or join the free trial)
- Create playlists from your BBM Music songs plus your friends’ songs
- Share playlists or single songs with BBM Music friends
- Follow your friends’ BBM Music activity via timelines and comments, or start up a BBM chat about your favorite bands
- Cache music for easy offline listening
- Seamless integration with other BlackBerry music services
More Friends = more music
When you add a new friend, you can also have their favourite song added to your music collection automatically, provided that you have agreed to share music with them. Your BBM profile can contain up to 50 tracks from the millions available from the BBM Music catalogue.
A great way to stay up on what your BBM Music friends are listening to is by viewing the activity timeline on the Home tab. From there, you can see what playlists your BBM Music friends are creating, what songs they’ve added to their profiles, and the comments friends are posting on your track selections.
From the Me tab, you can see your own BBM Music profile, including your 50-tracks and playlists, as well as the comments you’ve posted. You can also quickly see how many listens your music selections have received from your BBM Music friends, or shuffle your track list.
The Friends tab is the place to go to see your BBM Music friends and discover what they’re listening to. You can view specific friend’s playlists and tracks, add them to your own playlists, or post a comment. This is also the place to accept new BBM Music friend requests or send out some requests of your own. Of course, because BBM Music is a BBM-connected app, you can also start a BBM chat with any of your BBM Music friends from this tab.
Even more ways to discover music
If you’re looking to branch out and try something new, the Catalog tab is the place to go to find new tracks to add to your 50-song profile. Besides a general artist, album, song search, the Catalog tab also features preset song suggestions based upon genre, what’s new, top and most recommended tracks, and even picks from the BBM Music team. BBM Music will also tell you if a song of your choosing is in one of your friend’s music profiles, so you can grab it from them and not subtract from your 50-song total.
BBM Music also provides easy access to and from other BlackBerry music services for additional discovery and purchase. For example, if there are songs you love so much you’d like to purchase them, you can select the buy option and purchase directly from the Amazon MP3 Music Store.
No coverage = no problem
BBM Music tracks are cached to your SD card for offline listening, and you can do this for playlists, too, via the Options menu. This is a great feature for commuters, as you can access your music library even when you’re travelling to out of coverage areas. BBM Music also allows for music streaming over Wi-Fi, which together with the cache storage helps save on data usage.