Nokia to launch music service shortly?
Published by Rafe Blandford at 15:41 UTC, July 27th 2007
Fortune (via moconews) is reporting that Nokia may shortly be launching an online music store and downloading service similar to Apple's iTunes. The service is based around technology gained with the acquisition of Loudeye is expected to be announced at an upcoming Nokia event in London. It is also likely the event will also be the venue for the launch of the latest in the Nseries range of phones. Read on for further information and analysis.
Nokia acquired Loudeye a year ago and things have since been relatively quiet. It is possible that the original Loudeye platform could morph into a more generic content and media delivery platform for mobile devices. Existing Loudeye based implementations have around 1.6 million tracks available and this is a likely number for the Nokia service at launch.
It is very likely that it will allow consumer to buy and download music directly on their phone. This will offer Nokia a competitive advantage over some of its competition. The service will, presumably, enable consumers to purchase music and transfer it to their phone via their PC.
Traditionally such services have been provided by third parties, or (especially in the case of music) operators. Indeed one of Loudeye's primary areas of activities was and is providing white label music services to operators. However many operator services have met with only limited success with consumers preferring to buy music elsewhere.
We've commented in the past that Nokia music phones often suffered from the lack of an accompanying music store element when compared to other digital media players. In particular to compete with the music experience available on Apple's iPod and iPhone products an end to end user experience is a necessity. Inevitably such a service will be labeled as a response to the iPhone, although it has certainly be in the works for some time.
Nokia does have to pull off a delicate balancing act when developing services that compete with operators, which are and will remain their primary customers for the foreseeable future. At the same time services and software are becoming increasingly important as product differentiators and provided a complete experience is a key part of Nokia's strategy. Nokia has already taken the first steps in this direction with its Music Recommender (link works in Internet Explorer only sadly) service which is powered by the Loudeye engine.
An informative comparison can be made with the acquisition of mapping specialist gate5 and their smart2Go software. The acquisition formed the core of what is now Nokia Maps. This software first appeared in the GPS enabled Nokia N95, and has subsequently been made available for other phones (both Nokia and non-Nokia devices). Perhaps we will shortly be seeing the launch of Nokia Music?
Categories: Links of Interest, Industry, Editorial Thoughts
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 3
News Discussion
viipottaja
Interesting that the Fortune story also mentions the same service will be used to distribute games. Wonder if we will here a bit more about the N-Gage platform in the same event?
Dogmann
Hi all,
Well until quite recently i was quite a happy Sony Connect user until i realised i was actually paying more to download it then if i bought the CD. I also realised that a lot of Cd's now come with interactive links to extras that i have been missing out on. I now no longer need t burn a CD for in car use and was having to convert the downloaded Music to a format suitable for my device any way. So by buying the CD i have reduced the need to convert to just once and get a better quality recording and the ability to just rip it once to the qaulity i desire for my device. I am just not a fan of downloading Music any longer as it is more expensive and offers less.
Marc
Unregistered
too much to ask to do a basic spellcheck?
Unregistered
i agree on the data cost issues, but if you could use wifi?
Macboy
Nokia's Music Service one year download number will reach the number of one day of the iTunes Store. With some luck. Instead of this they should work on their iPhone rip-off.
krisse
"Interesting that the Fortune story also mentions the same service will be used to distribute games. Wonder if we will here a bit more about the N-Gage platform in the same event?"
I've often wondered about this, because the N-gage download system will basically be just selling and downloading data. They could use exactly the same infrastructure to sell absolutely anything including serious applications, music, videos... anything.
"Nokia's Music Service one year download number will reach the number of one day of the iTunes Store. With some luck. Instead of this they should work on their iPhone rip-off."
Macboy, FYI the iTunes store's sales are pathetic. 1 billion downloads sounds amazing, until you divide that up between the 100 million iPods sold over the past five years. 1 billion divided by 100 million works out at 10 tunes (1 album) per iPod in the entire lifetime of iTunes. Clearly, iPod owners don't give a damn about the iTunes store.
Unregistered
"Macboy, FYI the iTunes store's sales are pathetic. 1 billion downloads sounds amazing, until you divide that up between the 100 million iPods sold over the past five years. 1 billion divided by 100 million works out at 10 tunes (1 album) per iPod in the entire lifetime of iTunes. Clearly, iPod owners don't give a damn about the iTunes store."
LOL Obviously some iPod owners don't buy online because they have CD collections to rip, some others buy more albums and singles online. And with these sales Apple is the third largest *overall* music retailer in the U.S. Pathetic, huh?
-Macboy
Unregd
About a month ago while browsing Nokia's careers site, I found out that they were looking for Music Managers (for different countries) to run their local music stores. So this must be old news :)
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