It seems the UK mobile operators are getting excited about mobile music again, launching new ways to buy tunes and related content from your phone. For example, O2 has just teamed up with record label Sony BMG to launch a new service called My Play. It’ll be based around individual artists, and will let you buy songs, videos and ringtones from one place on the O2 Active portal. The companies say it’s the first time an operator and a label have partnered in this way, although it’s unclear whether O2 will let other labels join in the My Play fun. I think it’s an O2 thing rather than a Sony BMG thing, so hopefully it won’t be restricted to the latter’s bands. My Play will be selling full tracks for 99p, videos for £1.50, and ringtones for… £3.50. That’s right, more than three times the price of a full track. The idea of bundling all this stuff together into micro-sites is a good one, but operators’ ringtone pricing continues to make me scratch my head in bafflement.
Tag Archive for 'Sony BMG'
Nokia has signed up a second major label for its Comes With Music scheme, which launches later this year. The news was announced at an event in London.
This means Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Pink, Justin Timberlake and more artists will be available as part of the service.
Sony BMG joins Universal Music Group in partnership with Nokia, although there was no news on how close the other majors - Warner Music Group and EMI - are to signing, let alone the thousands of independent labels.
If you need a reminder about Comes With Music, the theory is simple: buy a Comes With Music phone, and you’ll get unlimited access to “millions” of tracks, for no extra cost, for 12 months.
And at the end of that year, you can keep everything you’ve downloaded (you’ll have to pay again to keep downloading new stuff though).
Nokia’s hopes for its new Music Store have been dashed slightly after Warner Music Group pulled out due to concerns over another Nokia service.
It seems Warner is withholding its music catalogue from Nokia’s music service because of Nokia’s Mosh social networking service that allows users to share files with each other on their devices.
In the current climate of music labels getting gittery over illegal downloads and track sharing eating into their already substantial profits, Warner would rather not be involved because Mosh users are illegally distributing copyrighted material.
Luckily for Nokia, major record labels like Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI are all still moving ahead.
In fairness Nokia has put in place checks to stop Mosh users sharing copyrighted material, although the Wall Street Journal apparently found Beatles tracks and Harry Potter content being shared on Mosh.
It seems record labels like Warner aren’t quite ready to embrace the possibly future of music distribution through content sharing on mobiles just yet.
[Via Arstechnica.com]
