Vodafone UK has been pushing mobile music hard as it builds up its holiday sales efforts, with its handset lineup offering a lot of music-centric devices, while it also announced its MusicStation service. MusicStation, powered by Omnifone, embodies the much-talked-about “jukebox in the sky” concept. For 2 pounds a week, Vodafone customers have unlimited access to a catalog of 1 million tracks, and it works essentially like any other subscription service: you have access as long as you keep paying; when you stop, you lose all the access — and playback rights.

So apparently in an effort to counter “the iPhone Effect”, Vodafone’s going to offer free access to MusicStation — to users spending 40 pounds a month on contract. That’s really generous, and hardly seems likely to really stop anybody from jumping over to O2 to pick up an iPhone if they really want one.

The problem here is that first, users haven’t shown a lot of interest in subscription services on their PCs. They seem resistant to the rental model for music — and it’s hard to see that really changing all that much on mobile. There are a few advantages here, such as not having to worry about device compatibility. But the bigger point is that offering this service for free probably isn’t enough to overcome the better user experience that the iTunes/iPod model offers users. As Russell pointed out earlier, “in order to launch a new product into a market, it needs to be hugely better than any incumbent - being as good as the competition, or just slightly better, doesn’t hack it.”

Is MusicStation hugely better than the sideloading, ownership model used by the iPod and iPhone? The subscription model really doesn’t seem like much of a lock-in for users, since it’s unlikely that Vodafone will have any sort of exclusive on this type of service for long. Never mind the fact that offering the free service only to people on plans of 40 pounds a month and higher seems like it will miss most of the users that really care about music on their mobiles.

What I don’t quite understand is that the response to the iPhone in the UK market would seem to be to emphasize the functionality of other handsets plenty of which meet or exceed those of the iPhone — not some 2 pound a week freebie.