Telecom's mobile Music Store has added some welcome functionality.

Anyone who buys a song for their mobile will now be able to download the same track to their PC at no extra charge. In our books this is a Good Thing. And Telecom's store encompasses all four major music labels (Warners, EMI, Sony BMG and Universal) and comprises over 450,000 songs, so there's plenty of music to choose from.

Another Good Thing is that the sound quality of songs downloaded to PC will be pretty reasonable, too. We've been critical in the past about the audio quality of Telecom's music store files (see >>FFWD, Feb/Mar 2006) - they're far too compressed and sound incredibly ropey. Happily the version that arrives on your PC will be in the protected WMA format and encoded at a bit rate of 128kbit/s which, while hardly audiophile, is standard for comparable music download services such as those offered by Digirama, Coketunes or Apple's iTunes Music Store.

There area couple of catches. The songs when downloaded to PC will only play back on Windows Media Player 10 (and you have to be running Windows XP). Fair enough, WMP offers the digital rights management component the record companies are looking for, and you can download WMP 10 for free here.

More concerning is that the online store is not a standalone operation; you must download songs to your mobile before they can be transferred to a PC. That means two things: you must have a Telecom mobile account; and you must have one of Telecom's service-supporting phones. At the moment Telecom offers just four such phones (though thankfully these include Samsung's very swish Motorola Razr-alike, the A900). You can see why Telecom has restricted things in this way, but it does seem a bit of a missed opportunity.

However, for us the biggest problem is that Telecom is still charging a ludicrous $3.50 per track. This is the same as Vodafone's music download service, and Telecom only charges once for the music file to go to your phone and then to your PC. But honestly, $3.50? When you can get the same song for half that price from Digirama or Coketunes?

We think the new, improved service is a great idea, and fair dues to Telecom, they're on the right track. But as we've been saying for months now, $3.50 is far, far too much to pay for one song when there are excellent and significantly cheaper alternatives.

More: Telecom Music Store FAQ

Telecom Music Store PC Downloads FAQ