Our take...
Regular Vodafone tariffs with comparable voice and text allowance cost £5 less than the new bundled subscriptions. MusicStation costs £1.99 a week, including data charges. Without music an unlimited internet subscription would cost an additional £7.50 a month. The tariffs therefore seem competitive for high usage subscribers.

November last year saw the launch of MusicStation with Vodafone UK, for £1.99 a week on low subscription tariffs and bundled 'for free' into tariffs over £40 a month on 18 month contracts. Vodafone was the first European operator to offer a music service bundled into a voice subscription tariff, with operators such as TDC in Denmark since following. Omnifone have recently announced that in terms of subscriber figures, MusicStation is the top UK digital music rental service although no indication has been given concerning the ratio of subscribers from the bundled voice tariffs to the standalone MusicStation subscribers. As previously noted by Screen Digest, bundling content with voice subscription services help maintain the operator's position in the value chain as well as driving the uptake of the content service itself. Indeed bundling internet and content into voice subscription proved successful for SFR in France. SFR's Illimythics 3G+ service, which combined internet, email, TV, texts and calls in one tariff, attracted 250,000 subscribers from launch in November 2007 to January 2008. This surpassed the operator's expectations of 100,000 subscribers and encouraged SFR to continue offering the bundled tariff outside of the promotional period. Although the Vodafone bundling will likely drive uptake of internet and music services, it seems unlikely that the offer will prove particularly significant in terms of uptake for Sky Mobile TV given its exclusion from the main subscription bundle.