BlackBerry Music goes silent

BlackBerry has reportedly emailed its BBM Music subscribers to announce that the service is being closed down this summer.

BlackBerry has reportedly emailed its BBM Music subscribers to announce that the service is being closed down this summer.

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In the message, the company says that the service will cease in June and that April will be the last month that current subscribers are billed. The email, posted to the Crackberry blog, also offers details of how to uninstall the app and offers existing BBM Music subscribers a one-month free trial of Rdio.

"Though BBM Music is going away, you can still listen to great music on your BlackBerry. We're giving you a 30-day pass to Rdio, which gives you unlimited, on-demand access to more than 18 million songs, including the latest hits and classic albums," says the email.

BBM Music was an interesting concept inasmuch as it combined streaming and music discovery with social networking. Subscribers with similar music tastes could access each other's playlists and for a monthly fee could swap out up to 25 new tracks each month.

BlackBerry is yet to give any reason for closing the service, though a number of posters on the Crackberry forum suggest that subscribers were finding it harder to link to friends and their playlists as so many people have deserted the BlackBerry platform in favour of Android or Apple over recent years.

As forum member Thunderbuck put it: "BM Music was a wonderful product. No, they didn't do a lot to market it, and it was introduced just as the brand was hitting a steep nosedive. It was the only genuinely social online music experience I've seen so far. That 50 song limit may have seemed tiny, but if you accumulated enough friends on the service you could have literally thousands of songs available."

Existing subscribers will start to see their playlists turn to grey over May as the service closes and their playlist friends migrate to other services, meaning that their shared songs can no longer be accessed.