With this addition, Cricket wants to give users complete music experience on their mobile devices. The Muve Music plan starts September 2nd and users will get three rate tiers aligned by data allotment. The plan will cost $50, $60, or $70 for 1GB, 2.5GB, and 5GB of data respectively. The change is seen as an initiative by Cricket to persuade users of lower-end, basic cellphones to upgrade to smartphones, which require more expensive plans. The company has also planned to stop offering the service on basic phones to new customers. With this plan, users will get a list of millions songs, from where they can download music. The songs cannot be transferred off the phone, and access disappears if a subscriber cancels service. Around 600,000 Cricket subscribers will now pay an extra $10 a month to get the service. Muve Music plan will be included in all plans for smartphones that use Google’s Android operating system. As Cricket Wireless adds new customers and others leave, the plan is expected to increase the count of Muve Music’s subscribers. Muve Music will become the largest music subscription plan in the US, in case its subscriber count exceeds 3 million in the two years that it normally takes for Cricket’s customer base to change over completely. Currently, both Rhapsody as well as Spotify have 1 million paying subscribers in the US, which makes them the market leaders. A brand of Leap Wireless International Inc., Cricket saw subscriber count drop to 5.9 million in the quarter through June, down from 6.2 million in the previous quarter.
