Following on from the Go Play event last week in this editorial feature Ewan gives us his personal take and first impressions on the new Nokia Music service. As part of our continuing coverage we will be following this up with a more detailed and descriptive look at the new music service in due course.
Read on in the full article.
Universal don't want to drive wholesale prices down they want them to go up. The problem they have with Apple is that Universal want to charge more money for at least some of their tracks (if not all) and would like some revenue from the sale of iPod's. For Apple and most of the public the fixed 79p tracks work. Also no Windows DRM based store has worked so far and with the number of iPod's in the world they probably never will - the future will be DRM-less stores as EMI is now doing.
As for the USP of impulse buying over the air? Look out for Apple's iPod launch today when they expected to announce just that.
Competition for Apple is good but yet another Windows DRM store isn't going to be it. Look term the major record companies are doomed to fail in their current guise.
A little off subject, I know, but the Nokia music ripping service and music files really aren't up to scratch. Rip a song with PC Suite and then do the same to an MP3. Listen to both through your E90 and compare.
Yes, the Nokia version is a tiny file in relation to the MP3, but it's hardly listenable!
As Ewan points out, Nokia Music Store files will be 192Kbps WMA files. Much higher quality than the files produced by PC Suite. They will play at that quality on compatible phones, but whether anyone could tell the difference between 192Kbps WMA and 128Kbps (DRM-free) MP3 in typical listening conditions for a mobile phone is moot.
As S60 is an open platform, presumably rival music services (or games services for that matter) could start selling content through their own downloadable S60 clients if they wanted to. Nokia couldn't stop them without closing the platform or running into anti-trust problems.
Your phone might turn into a high street of different service icons, and there might even be unofficial third party "personal shopper" applications that perform automatic price comparisons through the rival clients and then pick the cheapest option for a particular product.
In a way, this wouldn't necessarily harm Nokia because it's the hardware where the real money is made anyway, so anything which drives the sales of advanced (and pricier) hardware is going to benefit them overall.
It won't be like that forever though, one day all phone hardware will be cheap and low profit, which might be why Nokia are trying to move into internet services now so they have a next exciting big new profitable thing in the future.
"and if the networks will allow the music traffic through"
This raises an even more important topic, more important than any phone or service announcement. If the networks block traffic from what they see as a rival content service, even though the user is willing to pay the relevant data charges, that is surely an example of being anti-competitive, especially if the phone itself is locked to their network and the user is on a contract.
If it happens, I hope Nokia (and anyone else similarly blocked, including users) take it to the European Commission, because there's just no excuse for it, and it's time this kind of thing was stamped on. It harms customers, it harms competition among content providers, it harms content creators, and the only people it benefits are the networks.
How would people react if their broadband ISP blocked them from accessing iTunes because the ISP offered a similar but rival service? This would be even worse because at least changing ISPs is relatively painless and doesn't involve unlocking your PC.
krisse wrote:If the networks block traffic from what they see as a rival content service, even though the user is willing to pay the relevant data charges, that is surely an example of being anti-competitive
No, antitrust law can only be invoked if an incumbent is abusing a dominant market position.
Since no operator dominates a market, the Articles can only be invoked if there is a belief that all the operators are acting in concert. In other words: that they are ganging up on Nokia as a cartel, and acting in unison.
Therefore, if a single operator blocks Nokia, antitrust law can not be invoked.
The network operators are very aware of this, I can assure you.
Alister wrote:For Apple and most of the public the fixed 79p tracks work.
But they don't - no one's buying, and that's the problem.
Digital downloads are now worth around $2bn per year, but for the recording business, that doesn't compensate it for the fall off in CD sales, which is 40 per cent year on year in some markets. All this at a time when music has never been so popular.
The music business is beginning to realise that digital music can't be sold as a virtual discrete "product", and must be licensed widely, as a "service". It's moving to a risk model.
See here for more details -
www.theregister.co.uk/2004/02/11/why_wireless_will_end_piracy/