Fraser has already picked up the news that Nokia is launching its Comes With Music service in the UK next month, and I followed up with Carphone Warehouse’s announcement of some more details. It’s exciting news, but worth digging down into more of the details and implications, not to mention the questions that remain around the service.
The core service remains simple in its promise: buy a 5310 XpressMusic phone from Carphone Warehouse, and get unlimited music downloads from Nokia’s Music Store for a year, after which you can keep ‘em all even if you don’t pay an as-yet undisclosed monthly fee to continue subscribing to Comes With Music.
The first question is how much the Comes With Music 5310 will cost. Carphone says it’ll confirm the price later this month, but it’ll surely be more than the £69.99 - £99.95 you can currently buy the phone on paygo for on the retailer’s website.
This story in today’s Financial Times claims that Nokia’s research indicates paygo users would be willing to pay between £100 and £300 for a Comes With Music phone, providing an (admittedly vague) hint at the price point.
The second question is around the choice of the 5310 itself. The phone isn’t 3G, it doesn’t have Wi-Fi, and users will be on pay-as-you-go tariffs, possibly with ungenerous data pricing. So? Over-the-air downloads will be slow, and may cost them a packet.
Perhaps Nokia doesn’t want Comes With Music users to get their tunes over the air, but would prefer them to download to their PCs and then synch them over. After all, that’s the model Apple has been pushing with its 3G iPhone.
But while the choice of the 5310 shows a refreshing desire on Nokia’s part to make Comes With Music a massmarket service from the start, Nokia and Carphone must ensure buyers are fully aware of the data cost issues from day one. And educating paygo users about the price of data hasn’t been a strong point for the mobile industry in the past…
Of course, the fact that Nokia is describing Carphone as “the exclusive UK pre-pay channel offering the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic ‘Comes With Music’ edition” leaves the way open for other handsets to launch with the service, on monthly contract deals.
But here’s the next question: will any UK mobile operators be on board for Comes With Music? None are right now, reportedly because of the threat to their own mobile music download stores. It will be interesting to see detailed comparison of how Comes With Music compares to Vodafone’s MusicStation store, which offers a similar ‘unlimited downloads’ promise, albeit with more strings attached.
Next question: just how ‘unlimited’ will Comes With Music’s catalogue be? So far, three of the four major record labels have signed up: Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. The fourth is EMI, which has yet to sign on the dotted line - meaning no Kylie Minogue, Beastie Boys, Daft Punk, Spice Girls, Kraftwerk and a sheaf of other artists.
And Nokia hasn’t announced how many independent labels are signed up either - Franz Ferdinand, the White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys and many, many more. For the credibility of Comes With Music as an unlimited service, it really needs to sort EMI and a decent selection of indie labels before it launches.
Lots of questions, in other words, so should Comes With Music be written off? Launching in one country on a pay-as-you-go 2G phone through a single retailer is an interesting strategy, to say the least. Perhaps Nokia is going low-profile until it’s signed those remaining label contracts and got some operators on board.
That doesn’t mean Comes With Music isn’t an exciting development, both for the music industry and music fans. It’s part of a much wider trend that could change the way we acquire music. Partly nudged by the file-sharing phenomenon, the music biz is looking for new models, which include the ‘buy a device, get music free’ model seen here.
It’s not just phones, either. In the next year, I expect to see at least one British ISP launch an unlimited music service where the price of downloads will be rolled into your monthly broadband subscription. Meanwhile, Apple is strongly rumoured to be considering its own Comes With Music equivalent, wrapped into the price of an iPod or iPhone.
In short: the announcement of the 5310 Comes With Music edition raises more questions than answers, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Expect more appealing handsets to follow, as Nokia looks to capitalise on this wider move towards bundling music with devices.
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