Nokia announced a strong new way of entry into the music download game, attempting an approach similar to Apple’s ringtone-enabled and super-popular iTunes service with Comes With Music, a program launched as a tie-up between Nokia and music magnates the likes of Universal Music Group, Sony International, Warner Music Group and EMI, as well as many independent record labels. This project would put together an immense library of free music downloads for users buying Comes With Music edition phones, which they could download over a period of 12, 18 or 24 months depending on the plan that they bought their phone with.
Nokia announced the program in December of 2007, saying that they “set out to create the music experience that people are telling [Nokia] they are looking for – all the music they want in the form of unlimited downloads to their mobile device and PC,” and have since supported it with lively and entertaining launches and are now enjoying reasonably solid sales, albeit the figures for these have been released in a limited fashion thus far. However, many challenges are said to be just up ahead – and some are already making their potentially-destructive presence felt – for Nokia’s music download service.
A certain degree of what has been called “operator nonchalance” has been detected in the lack of strength in the low visibility and marketing allotted by operators to Comes With Music. Current Analysis
author Emma Mohr-McClune points out that operators are not promoting the service as heavily as Nokia might like, wondering why Comes With Music is “conspicuously absent” from the marketing materials of most operators. Even when mentioned, Mohr-McClune notes that only a brief description of Comes With Music is included without any real elaboration or promotion of its features and terms, which one might typically expect from a marketing campaign including a service.
Nokia itself is not exempt from possibly having made some missteps, particularly in the manner with which it launched the project. The US launch for Comes With Music was hampered by a delay, which was a bit of a contradiction to the company’s original plans to introduce the service to US-based subscribers this year. Mohr-McClune wonders at the reluctance, and notes that “most European and U.S. operators have an incentive to protect their existing, own-brand music services before promoting Nokia’s, hence the reluctance to market an alternative which has more to do with ensuring customer loyalty to the Nokia brand than growing an ARPU relationship with their own customers.”
Indeed, Nokia may be taking the time to refocus their efforts after having hit snags in the Comes With Music UK launch, where they launched with slightly older units the 5310 XpressMusic and N95 8GB. Reports are that only 23,000 subscribers initially went for the Comes With Music offering, although Nokia is hypothesizing that it may be the lack of interest in the service for the older units that may have caused the lack of enthusiasm. They have their work cut out for them for any future launches, particularly in the US where the mobile music market game is even more competitive.
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