Okay, so I’m getting slightly ahead of myself here. The news is that Nokia is buying music download company Loudeye, so it can “offer consumers a comprehensive mobile music experience, including devices, applications and the ability to purchase digital music.”
In other words, an iTunes for mobile. Maybe. But how will this be any different to what the mobile operators are already offering? And how will Nokia get around the issue of data charges? Right now, if I buy a song from Vodafone, I only pay the cost of the song itself, but if I buy from any other mobile music service, I also have to pay data charges for every megabyte I download.
The answer seems obvious – Nokia will launch some form of online music store that lets you download music to your computer, and then transfer it onto your Nokia handset (and if they’re smart, other manufacturers’ phones too), with maybe an application sitting on your phone that lets you preview tracks while out and about, and cue them up for downloading to your PC later.
Obviously, there are good reasons why I’m NOT in charge of Nokia’s product development strategy, so they could be planning something completely different. The acquisition won’t be finished until the end of the year, so it’ll be 2007 before we find out.
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