Cricket Wireless' subscription music service Muve Music has partnered with one of Brazil's leading mobile carriers, TIM. The expansion is Muve Music's first outside the U.S.
Brazil is South America's largest market, where TIM is a subsidiary of Telecom Italia and is Brazil's second-largest mobile carrier with a 26.9 percent share as of 2012, according to Billboard.
TIM music app is available in Google Play and there is a promotion running until April 15 in which users can access it for free. Muve Music will be rolled out next month with a marketing campaign.
The service will be available exclusively to customers of TIM Liberty, a post-paid service, and Infinity, a pre-paid service. TIM Liberty starts at R $49 (US $24.50) a month while the Infinity pre-paid service charges users as low as R $0.50 (US $0.25) for unlimited calls for daily use of the network.
The TIM music app was uploaded to the Google Play store Thursday, according to the "last date updated" information, and is currently compatible with the Samsung Galaxy S3, Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini, Samsung Galaxy Pocket, Samsung Galaxy Y, Samsung Galaxy Ace and Motorola Razr i.
Cricket Wireless launched its latest Android smartphone, Engage LT, last week as we reported. The device runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, has a 4-inch screen, a 1 GHz Snapdragon processor and a 3.2-megapixel camera. It retails for $199 online and in Cricket Wireless stores.
Launched in January 2011 by Cricket Wireless, Muve Music had more than 600,000 subscribers nearly a year later and there were reports it would launch internationally. The service hit 1.1 million users in January and just over 1.4 million than two months later, according to Billboard. Cricket Wireless finished 2012 with approximately 5.3 million subscribers, according to its 2012 annual statement; about 21 percent of Cricket customers subscribed to Muve Music.
