AT&T and eMusic Get in Tune

"Let's hear it for music!" That's the opening cry of Colourbox's obscure song "Hot Doggie" -- and if you're an AT&T mobile customer, you can download it to your phone as of today.

AT&T has struck a deal with eMusic, the #2 music download service (and the object of my repeated praise), in which people can download any of eMusic's 2.7 million songs directly to their phones. (Songs can later be transferred to a computer.)

While I'm always happy to see eMusic get more play, I was immediately struck by how un-eMusic this experience will be for AT&T customers. First, while eMusic is pretty much the least expensive download service out there (their most expensive subscription rate works out to about 33 cents per song), AT&T is charging $7.49 for 5 songs. And while eMusic stresses the play-anywhere aspect of their music (all their downloads are in MP3 format), AT&T's service currently only works on four handsets.

It's great that AT&T is exposing more people to eMusic and independent music in general, but it won't take long for people to realize it's cheaper just to buy the songs straight from eMusic and transfer them to their phones -- or just stick with their audio players.