Nokia Music Shop launches tomorrow
Published by Rafe Blandford at 12:29 UTC, October 31st 2007
Last night Nokia UK held a small press event in London where we were told that Nokia's UK Music Shop, first shown off at the Go Play event in August, will launch on Thursday morning (November 1st). Music is priced at 80p per track and £8 for a complete album. Read on for more details.
Other interesting bits from the evening include the news that both O2 and Vodafone will be carrying the Nokia N81 handset. TechDigest found an additional piece of information and is reporting that the Vodafone version will ship with both Nokia Music Shop and the subscription based Omniphone Music Station. Of course, how heavily Vodafone will promote the N81 remains open to debate. The N81 had previously drawn attention after several UK carriers (Orange and T-Mobile) were reported to have refused to carry the handset with Nokia services preloaded.
All of this is rather short sighted on the part of the carriers. It only takes one carrier thinking it can gain first mover advantage (O2 in this case) by promoting the new handsets and services for any stone walling on the part of the carriers as a whole to be ineffective. Moreover the N95 8GB, which will be heavily promoted because of the track record of the N95 classic, will support the same services, making the whole N81 saga even more ridiculous.
Here's a quick round up of what we know (though there is scope for change) about the Nokia Music Shop:
- There are two versions of the store, one for mobile devices and one for PCs. The Music Shop is initially web based for both mobile and PC versions (initially Internet Explorer only on the latter).
A dedicated Windows application, similar to iTunes, will become available in due course (it was demonstrated at Go Play, but will not be available at launch). The mobile version of the store offers full functionality, including payment and download over any connection bearer (realistically 3G or WiFi). If you download a song via the mobile store then it will be synchronised back to the PC when you next connect up the mobile.
- The four big music labels have been signed up (EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner), along with a variety of independent labels. Nokia is also placing an emphasis on delivering local music, so we can expect to see some regional variation in what is available and/or promoted. The range of music does seem to be very broad, with success even on some of the more obscure searches. All told there will be several million tracks available.
- Music is protected via Windows Media DRM. Tracks will be encoded in WMA format at 196 kbps. At some point in the future, the DRM will switch to Microsoft PlayReady which allows for greater flexibility, supports more media types (e.g. videos, ringtones) and supports additional formats (e.g. AAC+). Nokia is aware of the move to DRM-free music, but is somewhat constrained by its partners.
- 30 second previews are available in both the PC and Mobile versions of the store.
- Payment methods include credit card, PayPal and Premium SMS (in select countries). Users will have the option to put a certain amount of credit into their account (similar to PAYG top ups) or can pay on download. There is also support for vouchers and we suspect some devices will come with vouchers in the box to encourage initial usage.
- You can save songs (tagging) in the mobile store for later purchase and download in the PC store.
- The PC version has support for unlimited streaming music subscriptions at a cost of around £8 per month. Streaming subscriptions will not be available for mobile, although it is a likely that this feature will be added in the future. The twist on this compared to similar services is that various playlists will be made available with 'one click to stream' functionality. The playlists will be a combination of human edited lists (e.g. from famous artists or celebrities) and automatically generated lists based on user preferences.
- The store is, apparently, UK only for the moment, other countries will follow shortly.
You can see a quick demo on some aspects of the Music Shop in this video preview of the Nokia N81:
Update: There's now an official press release too.
Rafe Blandford, All About Symbian
Categories: Software, Editorial Thoughts, Events
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
viipottaja
Good stuff! Yeah, one can beach and moan about DRM all one wants, but the reality of the business is what it is and Nokia cannot single handedly change that. Can't wait to see it here in the US! It the selection is good and it works well, it will give Apple a good run for its money. Also, could not agree with you more on the point that the carriers refusing to carry N81 are behind their times.. business models are a changing and they better catch up.
Unregistered
Seems the music industry are just giving more power to the "legal" services in Russia etc, trying to charge £8 for an album? It's often cheaper to get the album shipped from a Channel Island retailer on CD complete with nice artistic cover etc, and rip it yourself. No pain in the butt DRM rubbish to deal with. No restriction on players etc.
The whole reason why 90% of people I know won't touch iTunes is because it's poor value for money and inconvenient. Drop DRM, it's like locking a door on a house with no walls, just plain stupid.
And £8 for an album? I haven't stopped laughing yet.
Unregistered
Unlimited streaming? Now that's all well and good but I want to be able to fill my mobile for that cost. If they did that they'd have an interesting service. As it is it's in a sort of halfway house between iTunes and Napster with no clear advantages.
viipottaja
Unregistered: "drop DRM". Sure, as you wish. Do you REALLY think they would not drop if they could? That's essentially a music industry decision, not a Nokia decision.
As for the price of an album 1) prices will OF COURSE vary depending on the market 2) a typical new release/best seller CD on UK Amazon costs UKP8.98. So 8 quid is about right.
Unregistered
Already online (see link in press release), agree 8.00 too expensive (a CD not too much more these days), with reduced packing, shipping, sales floor rent these downloads (at lower quality) should sit around the 5.00 mark...More profit for record company and assume the actual artist gets the same! Also using wma limits its appeal, use a more open standard and higher bit rate for my support...
zestuart
Actually it's up and running now, and it's pretty nice as browser-based experiences go.
Now it just needs to a) get to Firefox and b) get to my bally e90!!!!! *growl*
(Oh and maybe drop the DRM... But every techie knows they're way around it, right?)
Williamoni
Yep, eight quid is only about right for a new album. Go to play.com and get hundreds of albums for a fiver each, maybe thousands. And there's no messing around with DRM.
Far better to buy the actual CD and then rip it yourself.
Unregistered
zestuart: (Oh and maybe drop the DRM... But every techie knows they're way around it, right?)
zestuart, no need to be a techie, in fact it's not even necessary to have a mac to spoonfeed how to do it, my grandmother does it using a 2002 laptop on legalsounds
DRM is just so silly it's unbelievable.
soybomb
Just checked the site...
Supported platform: XP or Vista only
Supported browser: IE 6 and higher only
Supported players: DRM-enabled WMP only
Oh, not just the music, but the site as well -- I can't see anything but an unsupported-browser message. I'm sorry, is this 1996? Did we learn *nothing* about digital downloads (or for that matter, web accessibility) in the last 8 years?
Unregistered
They should be 50p top per song. I would rather buy the cd and put the songs on my phone myself and still be able to listen to good quality sound on my hifi. Or download mp3's for free lol.
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