There has been a lot of chatter on the Internet about Cingular Wireless and its new music service. (Read press release, a post at Mococo News and a Digital Music News commentary.) The Windows Media Digital Rights Management-driven, MobiTV-developed service promises "your music, your way." It will have content via subscription services from Yahoo! Music, eMusic and Napster.

If "your way" means over-the-air downloads, hold on a second. Songs from all three music services -- which users subscribe to separately -- cannot be downloaded to the phone over the air. All songs must be side-loaded from the user's PC. Users do have the ability to purchase tracks from the mobile phone, but the track will be delivered to the user's PC. For the truly mobile, Cingular will offer a streaming XM subscription -- $8.99 per month for 25 stations.

Cingular's service teases consumers with delayed instant gratification. At first glance it seems counterintuitive. Why keep a mobile device from making over-the-air downloads? Just look at the confusion/disgust when Microsoft announced that the Zune portable media player would have WiFi capabilities but would not be able to communicate wirelessly with the Zune marketplace or the base PC. (About the new services, Engadet wrote the "lack of mobile song purchasing straight to a handset seems to sort of miss the point"). If it's wireless, the thought goes, then why not go all the way? Aren't Zune and Cingular missing out on a gold rush of impulse, on-the-go mobile purchases?

It's a reflection of -- maybe the result off -- two important facts: the average person doesn't buy many digital downloads and mobile music needs a link to personal computers. An iPod is loaded up with tracks ripped from CDs or taken from P2P. Subscription services are a growing niche -- but still a niche. Cingular is, in effect, acknowledging that CDs and P2P drive music listening behavior, not over-the-air downloads, and certainly not over-the-air downloads in a subscription ecosystem.