UK 3G operator 3 reckons it’s come up with a novel music service in the shape of its Non Stop Music offering, launched on Thursday.

The service gives customers unlimited access to eight genre-based music streams, ranging from ‘dance’ to ‘classic’ at a price of £0.49 for 24 hours.

But we can’t help but think that this sounds an awful lot like radio you have to pay for, only it’s not even that — each station is on a 4 hour loop and the playlist is only updated once a week.

[via Telecoms.com]

Compare with Slacker (seen in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal):

The new Slacker players will come in three models, ranging from $200 to $300, depending on capacity. But the music they play will be absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. The stations will be automatically refreshed with new tunes via a wireless connection built right into the device. You’ll have to be near a hot spot for these updates. But you won’t need a hot spot just to hear your music, because the songs are cached on the device. And you’ll never have to plug it into a computer.

The player is tied to Slacker’s free Internet radio service, slacker.com, which is already up and running, and allows you to listen to music via any standard Windows or Mac Web browser. Using the service, you can personalize your player by selecting from over 100 canned stations or by creating stations based around any of 10,000 artists. These stations will be beamed to your player wirelessly. You can even choose which stations are loaded onto your player before the company ships it to you.

The company, a San Diego-based start-up of the same name, hopes to make money eventually via advertising on the player, and by selling an optional paid premium plan that offers some additional features.

And compare with Nokia:

Finnish vendor Nokia announced an extension of its mobile music platform on Tuesday, with the unveiling of a subscription service that allows users to keep their music.

At its annual investor day in the Netherlands, Nokia announced its ‘Comes With Music’ platform, that enables people to buy a Nokia device with a year of unlimited access to millions of tracks.

Once the year is complete, customers can keep all their music without having to worry about it disappearing when their subscription is over.

Seems like an awful lot of people are setting their sights on distributing music to you, one way or another. Motivations for the particular choices of pricing models? Implications for how companies are gambling on future directions of content revenue maximization?