Vodafone has announced it has launched the first fixed priced, full track music download service for mobile devices. The service has been launched in conjunction with mBlox and mobile music specialists New Visions, with musical input from The Ministry of Sound and V2.

The operators' data charges for downloading content are often cited as the reason for the slow uptake of rich media services on mobile. Currently consumers are not only paying for the value of the content via premium billing but also for the cost of the data traffic to deliver the content. As a result songs of about 1MB can cost consumers the £1.50 charge for the song plus an additional £8 in data charges.

These new data tariffs are low enough to be bundled with the cost of the song and provides the consumer with a single cost for both the content and the download. This means consumers on Vodafone buying from MoS or V2's WAP site, created by New-Visions, will not incur any data charges on their mobile phone bill.

The removal of data charges is perhaps the most interesting part of this agreement, with the data transmission effectively zero-rated for music downloads. Vodafone's on-portal data access has always been zero-rated, and they recently announced zero-rating for third parties as well.

"Rich media, especially music downloads, are the future for the mobile entertainment industry" said Andrew Bud, executive chairman of mBlox. "A massive step forward has just happened, thanks to Vodafone. For the first time, we can offer a viable business model for rich content delivered direct to the consumer. Direct to consumer rich media has been unviable till now".

"This is a colossal milestone in the story of mobile entertainment" said Bud. "I hope that other mobile operators in UK and other countries will follow suit soon."

Thanks to 160 Characters.