BlackBerry is to kill its nearly two-year-old music service BBM Music and is instead ushering users in the direction of Rdio, with a voucher for a 30-day pass to the streaming-music service.
BBM Music is a service that lets users keep 50 hand-picked songs in a playlist and listen to tunes from their friends’ picked playlists also.
In an email to users, BlackBerry said: “BBM Music service will be discontinued as of June 2, 2013.
“For paying customers, April is the last month that you will be billed. In May, as your BBM contacts stop using the service, songs in your playlists will begin to turn grey and will no longer be available.”
Last week, smartphone marker BlackBerry revealed a fourth-quarter profit of US$98m, or US$0.19 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of US$125m, or US$0.24 cents a share, in its first financial results since releasing its flagship Z10 smartphone.
During the fourth quarter, BlackBerry shipped about 6m BlackBerry smartphones, including 1m units of the new Z10, and about 370,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
The company lost 3m subscribers, however. BlackBerry reported some 76m subscribers, down from 79m in the previous quarter and 80m a year ago.
