More on Comes With Music

On Monday I posted about Nokia's announcement of the Comes With Music launch in the UK. Yesterday, Music Ally posted some details from Carphone Warehouse about the service.

From this I learned a few things worth commenting on:

• The service will initially be available only to pre-paid customers. This is smart. I can't put my finger on the cite right now but I have seen data that show pre-paid cellphone customers are more interested in music than post-paid customers. My guess is that Nokia has seen this data also.
• Music is only provided through OTA download. Tracks can then by synched between phone and PC. This goes counter to current consumer behavior, which follows the opposite, much less expensive, path - music downloaded to PC and then sideloaded to phone. Correction - From MusicAlly: Nokia has confirmed to Music Ally that the 5310 WON’T support OTA downloads for Comes With Music - meaning users will have to download and sync tracks via their PCs instead. Therefore, Nokia will be pitching the service as a PC-based one, at least in this first iteration, until more handsets are available.
  Simon Ainslie, MD of Nokia UK, tells us that the company has “agreed ways of working with most of the operators, and contracts [are] in place”, although he’s not saying who just yet. But he’s bullish. “This is not a test, it’s the full launch. We’re going to be very loud and very big about it as we head into the Christmas period.”
• Users need to pay data charges for the OTA downloads. Surely, Nokia is doing this for the labels - not for the consumer. Not a good feature of a "free" service.

It is clear that Nokia fails to grasp two critical aspects of mobile music:

1. The principle of selling the Time Spent Listening applies to this channel just as it does to every other channel for recorded music. Nokia and its partners will not make money by selling other units associated with recorded music - in this case handsets or OTA bandwidth.
2. In mobile music the handset is the interface between the listener and his music. Nokia, therefore, is in the best position to control and profit from selling the Time Spent Listening to music. Not recognizing that they are in this enviable position is Nokia's biggest mistake.