By Contador Harrison Wanarua

When I heard on radio that Blackberry has launched a monthly music subscription service called BBM Music, which it hopes will be popular amongst its millions of instant messenger users I was not shocked because recently RIM seem to be targeting the teens and youths. The new service that allows BlackBerry users to share music with friends. BBM Music enables BlackBerry users to select 50 songs from a catalogue of millions of tracks for their own personal playlist, according to Alistair Mitchell, RIM's vice-president of BBM platform and integrated services.

The users can share songs from that list with friends who use the instant messenger service."By threading the culture, the immediacy and the trusted contacts that (make up) BBM with music we thought we could create a really compelling, unique experience," said Mitchell."Through BBM Music I can find out in real time what music matters to my friends ... I'm seeing music bubble up that I wouldn't even had thought about, or it's reminding me about music from my college days."

Research in Motion is hoping the social aspects of the service will appeal to the many youthful users of its Blackberry Messenger (BBM) platform. The BBM platform has more than 45 million users worldwide. BBM Music allows users to have access to all 50 songs on a friend’s profile and share songs with each other. Ten million songs have been licensed from all the major record labels.

My earlier observation is that BBM Music dynamically and elegantly integrates the excitement of this social music discovery process with a high-quality music service but have a feeling it may not even get closer to where iTunes is. According to the preview available online, the music can be saved to smartphones to listen to while offline and users can keep track of how many friends are listening to your tracks. As I have said before RIM only need a well-designed software products that make the BlackBerry cooler is what users needs not 20 new phones, they need excellent services and software’s.

Leveraging BBM which is its biggest strength with young people in any way it can RIM seems to have woken up because BBM is an extension of teens and youths which in some countries it's like the backbone of college culture where almost everybody's got BBM. Mainstream bloggers seem to have unkind comments towards the service but I feel RIM is trying to create a different service and the limited number of songs allowed per profile which somehow is strategic in my opinion.

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