Comes with Music changing to Ovi Music Unlimited (UK)

I recieved an email today confirming what you mentioned at the bottom of the article - Nokia Music will become Ovi Music. It says:

We are excited to announce that Nokia Music will soon be part of Ovi. This gives you :

DRM-free MP3 files which you can play on a PC, Mac or any personal music player.
Faster, easier way to browse, search and download the music you want.
Improved stability for downloading.
Look for an upcoming e-mail announcing when we become Ovi music and details regarding your account. Until then, to help the transition to Ovi go smoothly, try to avoid changing any of your Nokia Music account details such as your password, email address or mobile number

MP3, drm-free, unlimited... looks promising! I'm interested... 😉
Let's see the execution and pricing details.
Ovi player is quite poor. It would be nice if Ovi bypasses the desktop altogether and keep the central repository of everything on the web (a la spotify)

So they did what I said I hoped they would at the time of the India start of OMU, and changed it in other markets too. "Music Unlimited" is a much better brand as it conveys they idea of unlimited supply, where as CWM could be misunderstood as saying "Oh we put in a CD's worth of music on the phone"! 😊

DRM free too. NOW this service is starting to make a LOT more sense and look appealing - hope they launch it in the US.. yeah right.. keep dreaming. 😊

Hmmmm the DRM free side of things doesnt look like its for everyone... here in the UK for eg, this is what I got... (seems to miss that DRM gem out)

We are excited to tell you that Comes with Music will soon be part of Ovi. Along with a new name and a sleek new look that is easier than ever to use, with Ovi Music Unlimited (formerly Comes With Music) you'll still have access to millions of free tracks, plus, a faster, easier way to browse, search and download music.

Look for an upcoming e-mail announcing when we become Ovi music and details regarding your account. Until then, to help the transition to Ovi go smoothly, try to avoid changing any of your Nokia Music account details such as your password, email address or mobile number.

The Comes With Music venture and the new OMU is bewildering to me.

Why is Nokia even bothering with this? Selling music is not one of their core functionalities or an area of expertise. They don't do it well, it didn't take off previously, so why again? It's just good money after bad, pouring down a resource hole.

Even Microsoft can't get it to work, first with PlaysForSure, now with the Zune Market.

Cede the space to the online music services and players like Amazon, Rhapsody, Pandora or iTunes, and concentrate efforts on making the best devices possible with non-buggy, non-crashy release firmware. Okay?

Jimmy, most of this is - at least so far - aimed at markets where music services are not well developed. Such as India and Brazil - and in those Nokia Music and CWM/OMU has been doing fairly well, AFAIK. Also, Nokia DOES have very impressive local music libraries in those countries so that's a big comparative advantage it seems. Also, I am not sure this is THAT expensive for Nokia to do. They are unlikely to be pouring billions or even hundreds of millions on this.

Finally, its about providing a completed key services suite through Ovi. There ARE hundreds of millions of Nokia's out there and that CAN be leveraged.

Having said all that, Nokia would do well partnering with others (even) more.

@Jimmy1 +1

So busy making services they're not very good at and in the meanwhile forgotten to develop their handsets and OS as much as the competition. The platform is where the battle is and once/if Nokia loses that then they going to be left being a rather inexperienced Nimbuzz/CoPilot/Amazon etc. in a market those guys understand. So busy being distracted by the service layer they forgot to do the basics and it's proving very costly and they're running out of time to catch up, they've already missed one generation of smartphone converters in the West they can't afford more.

The service stuff is great but Apple and Android have just enabled the experts to do it and take a slice of the action whereas Nokia has been trying to take it all on themselves without understanding the scalability of the rest of the world developing services against you; a Wiki effect if you like. So Nokia can never have enough resources to make their service offerings look as current as those available elsewhere. Compounded by the fact they're not very good at it to start with, NGage, terrible search function in Ovi messaging crashing etc etc.

Consistent branding is good but I don't think its going to help.

Consumers for what ever reason just have not taking to subscription music services on any platform.

Presumably they'll also be making the service Mac compatible because at the moment I can't use it. When I try I always get redirected from ovi.music.com to http://music.nokia.co.uk/UnsupportedOS/home.aspx?setterritory=1

...with a message saying Safari and MacOSX isn't supported. For that reason I don't use it on my phone either.

The Ovi Player doesn't support Macs either which is kind of shocking when Nokia are the owners of Qt, the Mac, Windows and Linux cross platform development environment.

I agree on the local collection part. Here in India Ovi has a very nice collection of local music (though not comprehensive) and is a good source to download high quality music.

Just to be clear on the DRM issue.

CwM (Now OMU) will continue to have DRM.

However pay per track (Ovi Music) will go DRM free (MP3 files).

i.e. there's a difference between the unlimited (subscription) and pay per track model. It easy to see why if you think like a music industry exec 😉

Ahhhhh ok... yes, now I see...

and touch� on the last point 😉

viipottaja:

Ovi has cost hundreds of millions and makes Nokia phones less attractive. Ovi kills Nokia stone dead in the USA - people want Facebook, Google, Twitter etc not the poor copy. Ovi is like another layer of operator branding cruft we all hate. It is a competitive disadvantage when people are choosing a phone.

ComesWithMusic is the only distinctive and original Nokia service idea but it's failed and is VERY EXPENSIVE for Nokia to run, the record companies still get paid, it wipes out the profit margin on the device.

"Finally, its about providing a completed key services suite through Ovi. There ARE hundreds of millions of Nokia's out there and that CAN be leveraged."

That must have sounded good in a meeting one day but is pure Dilbertspeak. Nokia needs to get rid of people who talk and think like this, and replace them with people who understand the real world.
Snoflake is right.

Yes, I got my email today saying about the DRM-free MP3s. Problem is, it's years too late. We've all got our accounts set up now with Play.com and Amazon; why should we change? What's more, I now bear a grudge against Nokia Music because of all the money I spent on DRM'd music that stopped working after a few months, with no hope of getting it back. Consequently, if Ovi Music was the last music store in the world I'd be reluctant to use it.

I don't understand how Ovi discourages Nokia purchases, basically I buy a Nokia phone and ignore Ovi, the basic phone is very good at using the web stuff I really want. The only thing that I use that is better than any alternative is the ovi maps and nav, but that is only because Google maps and nav are crippled by its idiotic need for a connection.

It is true though that there is no point in Nokia trying to create a service to compete with established dominant web services, it's like trying to create extra standards and personally I want one standard that works with everything. Just as I can jump into any car and drive it, because the of the standard interface.