Vodafone and O2 both announced new music offerings this week, reflecting the urgency with which mobile operators are trying to win new customers with web-based services on phones.

Vodafone launched a full, pay-per-track music download service, which will let customers with certain Sony and Nokia handsets download tracks directly to their phones for 99p and albums for £7.99.

O2 meanwhile introduced a service called MyPlay, which also offers music tracks for 99p and videos for £1.50, and allows customers to interact with bands via "microsites", getting access to news as and advance tickets for shows.

Vodafone's offering, called Vodafone Music, will only be available on 11 handsets, including several Sony Ericsson devices and the Nokia 73. It will complement an existing Vodafone service called Music Station, which for £1.99 a week allows customers to subscribe to a service which gives them access to a vast library of tracks that disappear once their subcription ceases.

O2's service will be available on 350 handsets to both prepay and contract customers, but has a reduced catalogue: the only participating artists so far are the Zutons, Usher, the Ting Tings, and the Script, though about three artists will be added to the service every month.

An O2 spokesman said: "The aim of MyPlay is not to provide a large library of tracks but to provide in-depth artist content which their fans can access directly."

Songs will take about a minute to download over the 3G network - and video two minutes, O2 said, though the speed would depend on the connection in the area. Neither download will be transferable to any other device - not even the owner's PC.

Vodafone's service is understood to involve deals with all the four major record labels, but O2's will initially only include artists with Sony BMG. O2 was, however, "working closely with all its music partners on a range of propositions," a spokesman said.

O2 already offers an a la carte music download service which charges 99p per track and is powered by Napster, the music site.

The new services, launched within a day of one another, demonstrate the urgency with which operators feel they have to develop own-brand services such as music downloads in order to share in the growing data revenues from phones.

An iPhone owner who wants to download music, for instance, goes directly to a mobile version of Apple's iTunes store - bypassing O2's web portal, even though the handset runs on the O2 network.

It is possible that when the Google-backed mobile phone operating system, Android, launches at the end of the summer, owners of handsets powered by the new software will also be able to bypass operator portals when accessing services via the mobile web.

Operators are understood to be working on deals with handset makers which will mean that their portals are prominently displayed on the screens of Android-powered phones.

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