Comes With Music Has A Massive 23,000 UK Users

Steve has has moved on too! 5800 😊

I think the marketing to customers has been misleading. The message that the music is essentially free hasn't been made clear.

Also the fact that the 5800 and the CWM marketing .. bands (stripes) are similar lead me to confusion that the 5800 came with music when in fact it doesn't .. yet.

Also the phones are too old.

What they should do IMO is release an after-market package that can be purchased which would allow existing customers to pay for the value added services. Wouldn't this be a prudent idea in these hard economic times? People can't afford a new phone, but perhaps they can afford the to get a music addon for their existing phone for �50 or so?

Great post Ewan and spot on.

I have an E71 and if it were possible to use CWM I would not even bother. I can download from Amazon or iTunes and keep the music right away. I think Nokia should stop wasting money on sort stuid ideas should use this same money to hire one or two designers away from Apple.

Commentators are assuming that people are snubbing CWM, but for that to be true people would first have to understand what it is, and I don't think 99.9% of people really understand what's on offer.

-Most people I know have never heard of CWM, even the ones that use Nokia handsets for music playback

-Those who have heard of CWM mostly think it's just another music store

-The tiny number who have heard of CWM and who realise CWM is a subscription service mostly think they have to give up the tracks at the end of the year

...so no matter how attractive the deal might be, it doesn't make any difference because people don't know about it.

The main selling point, unlimited downloads to keep, just isn't being advertised at all, anywhere.

But also they should have launched this on the 5800 for many many reasons:

1) The 5800 is a brand new phone which no one owned at the time CWM launched, so everyone who wanted a chance to buy a 5800 CWM handset would have been able to.

2) According to a recent report on Mobile Today the 5800 is now the best-selling MP3 player in the UK, so it would have brought spectacular numbers of subscribers to CWM.

3) The 5800 is attracting a lot of attention and praise, and this would no doubt have rubbed off on CWM if it was seen to be associated with the service. It would also have given the 5800 a distinctive selling point which its rivals wouldn't have had.

3) Ewan mention's Steve's enthusiasm for the N95 8GB, but that's exactly the problem: Steve was so enthusiastic about the N95 8GB that he bought it BEFORE the CWM service launched so even if he wanted to use CWM he wouldn't be able to. Most people who want to buy an N95 8GB or 5310 have already bought it, and Nokia won't let them get CWM purely because they bought their phone too early.

Can someone, anyone, please come up with a valid business model that satisfies the handset manufacturer, the music industry, and the end user?

Actually, yes, there is a valid business model which makes sense:

-Music industry already makes X amount of profit per user in a typical year.

-User pays that X amount (with a little bit extra on top) to the music industry via premium price hardware.

-Music industry allows that user unlimited access to their catalogue for a year.

You might think X is a very large number but I don't think it is, because most of the price of a typical CD doesn't actually go to the publisher. Also, most people don't actually buy CDs that often, perhaps a dozen or two a year.

On top of that, X will get progressively smaller as piracy takes its toll, so the above business model will get more attractive as time goes on.

All that a manufacturer would have to do is add X on top of the price of a device, share a bit of the device's profit margin with the music industry, and they would all be making money from it.

"Commentators are assuming that people are snubbing CWM, but for that to be true people would first have to understand what it is, and I don't think 99.9% of people really understand what's on offer."

Absolutely right. From the name of the service down the marketing has been dreadful, no matter how much money they have thrown at it. It seems to me their entire campaign is reliant on staff at Carphone Warehouse etc selling the service as an extra, instead of getting people to actively buy it.

I do believe subscription music services are the way to go, but probably on desktops not phones.

Don't know how salvageable CWM is, especially after Nokia's recent financial results. It would be embarrassing to scrap it in a single step, but they could strangle it without anyone really noticing.

Those figures aren't great, but I'm suprised about all the doom and gloom. The service has had very limited availebility on few markets and limited to few unsexy phone models.

It could just as well be about just testing the waters. Open beta of sorts. How much people download, how much bandwith is required per user, how much server power is required , getting the operation ready and runnning reliable for large scale use before it's availeable for popular handsets, how many songs people download when they are "free", etc etc. Nokia really doesn't have any experience in runnig the kind of gargantuan on-line service that CMW could become.

This kind of service has never been tried before. I would certainly try it first with the kind of limited scope Nokia has used so far.

The Pirate Bay founder's guilty verdict this week basically answers the questions raised by this article. It is extremely indicative of the consummate wholesale failure of the media industries to adapt and thrive (and if they don't change soon, survive). Nokia is not "the evil music/movie industry" but Comes With Music is a hanger-on of this whole technically and morally bankrupt system.

You are right - people can get their music elsewhere, therefore the proposition is not attractive. Simple as that.

When will the media industries realise that they are NOT in control of consumers? It is the other way round, as they are learning very painfully now. Yes, the media industries WILL die if they are not very carefully and change rapidly and radically.

At this point in history, filesharing is the future. Please do not read the subtext of that as "ripping off content creators and getting everything for free is the future". That is what ignorant people currently read support for filesharing as. If the media industries were TRULY intelligent, they would take the filesharing technology and model, and go with the flow, and adapt a business model around it, and make lots and lots of money off the back of the excellent technology of filesharing. And clearly a "charge per download" model ain't gonna work, because people will just share amongst themselves, and rip and copy (so DRM has no future). They need to find something else.

And while we're on the subject, studies have show clearly, AGAIN, that filesharers buy more and spend more. But of course the establishment can't possibly accept that.
http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars

Meanwhile, the BBC who seem to really have a clue, embrace filesharing technology in the form of BitTorrent, wholeheartedly: http://torrentfreak.com/bbc-gets-ready-for-bittorrent-distribution-090409/

Alex Kerr
PhoneThing.com
[email][email protected][/email]

Those figures aren't great, but I'm suprised about all the doom and gloom. The service has had very limited availebility on few markets and limited to few unsexy phone models.

Well, exactly. Let's keep things in perspective, the roll-out has been VERY limited:

-No proper advertising of CWM's actual selling point (unlimited tracks to keep)

-Only available in tiny number of countries so far

-Only available through one retailer in the UK

-Only available on two handsets, both of which are fairly old

-People who had already bought those handsets can't use CWM, even if they're willing to pay extra for it

-People who buy other Nokia handsets can't use CWM

Nokia really haven't been pushing this service at mainstream customers at all.

Most people who might use CWM don't know about it, most people who know about CWM haven't really understood it, and most people who understand CWM aren't able to use it even if they want to because they've already bought their Nokia device.

I'm really enjoying my 5800 and would love to use CWM on it, but CWM isn't available in my country yet, and even when CWM does become available Nokia won't let me use it on my 5800 because I didn't buy it with the service. I'd be willing to pay the difference to get access to the service, but Nokia isn't offering that option.

If even an enthusiastic potential customer can't get CWM, then it's impossible to judge how good the service itself actually is.

Come with Music is actually a great and wonderful drug. And like all drugs, you litterally need to force/push/put a gun over the head of the user to get them smoking it.

But once you get them hooked, they'll beg for more and will come back to you.

Totally agreed on the 5800. Come with Music should be included with every 5800 phone. If the feature is already there, the user will use it, abuse it and then get addicited to it.

Very bad call on the implementation strategy. Nokia now need to come up with another very desireable device and make music a part of the purchase.

This is not non-sense. Apple was able to force AT&T users to sign up to a data plan when they buy a iPhone, Nokia should force user to sign up to Come with Music when buying the 5800.

How the hell do you think the iphone became the phone with most mobile web traffic. Every user in the US is forced to have a data plan when getting the phone; do you think they will not try to use the 20$ or 30$ monthly service forced on to them?

Think!!!!!!

I must be one of the 23,000 that Nokia got it right for.

Last month, I needed a new phone and was willing to spend �400. iPhone has limited capabilities in the areas I was looking for (no MMS, cut and paste or document/ file handling abilities and a dodgy camera) and I also didn't want to transfer to the 02 network (I have wangled a pretty awesome monthly fee for Orange services right now.)

Blackberry only have one 3G/Wi Fi phone (the Bold) and that has had all kinds of problems on the Orange Network.

Which left me with Nokia. The N95 8GB has been around long enough and the firmware updated sufficiently so as to provide a very solid and reliable phone. It also got awesome reviews across the board in almost every area, especially with the firmware updates. Using predictive text did not bother me so a full size keyboard was not necessary. For me the age of the phone was a bonus- phone companies so often release phones too early, then have to fix them on the fly with firmware updates. This was not the case with the N95 8GB. Works out the box.

The Comes With Music clinched it. I knew about it from poster campaigns and was reminded about it on the Nokia website. I paid an extra �60 for it and am steadily downloading my music. I can only play the music on my phone or one PC but the only other limitation is hard disk space. The Nokia Music store has a plentiful supply of music - I would say 90% of the albums I have searched for are there for the taking or arrive a little while later and I have fairly diverse tastes. It is great to be able to download music that I am not sure about. Lilly Allen's album is dull as anything, but I have lost nothing by downloading it.

The only downside is the Nokia Music application, which keeps crashing on my PC. I am meticulous about registry clean ups and the like, so it is unlikely to be my PC which is the problem. Compared to iTunes, it is pretty clunky, and it also seemed to struggle with transferring 756 tunes to my phone at the same time. I think I will need to break them down a bit first. If they could sort this out, I will be a happy customer.

Comes with music is not available from just one retailer in the UK, Three have had the N95 8GB CWM edition...

Why can't you just accept and admit for once that your beloved Nokia has completely failed instead of trying to make up stupid excuses for them?

Another music service in an already saturated marketplace! Had Nokia made CWM truly compelling, and more widely available, they may had a hit on their hands. As it is, there are already tons of readily available, worldwide music services to choose from. I don't know about anyone else, but unless Nokia can give something I can't elsewhere, at a lower price, I'm not interested in their very limited offering.

Clearly, Nokia needs to learn some lessons in marketing from the folks in Cupertino. iTunes makes it ridiculously easy to download music, applications, and synchronize data to and from the phone and PC/Mac. Nokia would be wise to pick ONE of its suite applications (be it Ovi, PC Suite, or whatever), and focus exclusively on making that solution easy to use. Strike a deal with Amazon or another competitor to iTunes, and put the Ovi App store on that application, too. If you can't beat-em, join-em.

CWM is different because it is unlimited music downloads to a single device for as long as the fee is paid. Quite an improvement on all of the other offerings because they are asking silly money per track, and the iTunes DRM was just a stupid piece of awkwardness that put many off (nothing to learn from Cupertino there except from the mistakes).

What I have found is that I can pay 50p or �1 for some absolutely stunning albums in my local charity shops, rip the tracks and they are mine forever on any device.

Downloadable music doesn't even come close. It's just not attractive in any of its forms (apart from a few .ru sites), but CWM is the best of a bad lot.

I don't know a music downloader that doesn't detest iTunes. CWM should be in a position to clean up, it's the reverse of the app shop/download situation.

Carstairs wrote:I don't know a music downloader that doesn't detest iTunes. CWM should be in a position to clean up, it's the reverse of the app shop/download situation.

Several people I know have been confused by the CWM & 5800 advertising running in parallel in the UK (earlier in the year) with a similar style. They thought the 5800 would include CWM, and were dissappointed to find that it did not.

I haven't seen many reviews for CWM, what is the range of music like? I know in Thailand the 5800 XpressMusic only has a 6 month CWM subscription, and from searching the net it seems to only include 2 or 3 labels of Thai music.

This is more about Nokia's mentality, and it's a losing mentality.

Nokia could have done what Google did... partner with Amazon to create a download application that ties into Amazon. No DRM, decent prices, and everyone wins (for example, I picked up the new DM album on Tuesday for 3.99, which is hard to beat). If they did that, people wouldn't have to worry about being locked into future CwM devices or worry about DRM restrictions.

But, Nokia being the company of the epic fail, they couldn't do that. They had to control the distribution points as well as the hardware. In short, they wanted to be another Apple and the industry isn't going to let anyone else pull that off.

Time for Nokia to re-evaluate some of their thinking, IMO.

I don't think it's Nokia's fault if people are ignorant enough to confuse "XpressMusic" with "Comes With Music". Just how stupid do you need to be? Do these same people think that A Blu Ray and Sting Ray is the same thing?

wanna solve all ur problems with cwm? Get utorrent on your pc, visit mininova.com then download any song u want and put it on ya 5800.. This also stops apple ripping u off on itunes

Quote "I don't think it's Nokia's fault if people are ignorant enough to confuse 'XpressMusic' with 'Comes With Music'. Just how stupid do you need to be?"

So why run an ad campaign for CWM using the same stripes as the stripes they used for the launch of the 5800 Xpressmusic.
So why run TV ads for CWM when it was not even available to the 5800 or most of the Nokia phones that has any kind of music playback.
Comes with music - a statement of fact or just leading the horse to water then letting it fall in of it's own accord.
So which would you buy?

XpressMusic - Nokia Music Store
XpressMusic - Comes with music

It doesn't matter which you choose, you would have got the same. A phone & service
They're not stupid, Just ad folks getting up to their old tricks.

I am from Singapore, and CWM is available with the 5800 with its launch in Feb.

Surprised that 5800 is not bundled w CWM in UK. 5800 with CWM is an absolute joy to use. The cost is negligible compared to the unlimited tracks you can download, limited by the one year period, your time and your harddisk space. What people don realised is that you KEEP all the tracks after one year.

I would prefer to download from a legal music store and not worry about incomplete/missing/inaccurate MP3 tag thru illegal download. It is jus so organised and smooth. In fact CWM introduced me to using a online music store and I am hooked.. perhaps that's one of the objective of CWM...introduce (educate?) more people to the Nokia Music Store.