Warner signs with Nokia Music - So What?

This is just Nokia playing catch-up with the only real online music store that matters: iTunes. And the major labels are more than happy to sign up because they are sick and tired of being dragged over the coals by Apple (let's be honest here, by Steve Jobs himself). CD sales are down, way down, so the labels have to do something to staunch the bleeding, but the only real game in town is iTunes, and Jobs knows it. Yes, there are others, like mp3tunes, Amazon's new offering, and eMusic (Disclosure: I use the eMusic service and like it, but it is really just a DRM-free online music shop with an ugly interface, independent music, and a sort of clearing house for older albums).

In response to Apple's iTunes dominance, Nokia creates this hybrid subscription/purchase model where, based upon a handset purchase, you get a year's worth of free music and some sort of one-touch purchase deal where you can conveniently purchase a song you listen to. It sounds great, but I have some pretty strong reservations about it actually working.

First of all, this has to be an easy and seamless experience. This is the one and only reason that Apple has succeeded in this space where everyone else has failed. (well, their products are cute, too, which helps). I am sure it will get better, but my experience with Nokia Music is that it crashes, and crashes hard when trying to import my music into it. I never even got to the point of importing the music into my phone. So, after fiddling with it (uninstalling/reinstalling .NET and so on) for a couple hours, I simply chose the mp3 folders I wanted and dropped them right onto my phone's memory card. That took two minutes.

I assume that Nokia will get the music client working (although from recent experience, this is a big assumption). And, certainly, their focus is going to be on the phone's software and interface. They want (and must first) make this service usable solely from the handset. Many people (like me) will want some sort of PC client, but there are many that simply will not care about a companion desktop application (young people living solely on their phones), and then there are those of us left out in the cold anyway: Mac and Linux users. For this article, I am going to assume the handset interface will be perfect and that the PC music client will at least be usable. And even with those assumptions, I am going to say Nokia Music will be marginal at best.

The one advantage Nokia has over Apple's iTunes is that you can buy the music when you are listening to it, namely, when you are on the go. Oh, wait, Apple has an iPhone and an iTouch, so they're already on the go. Uh-oh. Like I said above, Nokia is just playing catch-up with Apple here. They are hoping that their massive mobile phone market penetration will immediately propel them into this space. I do not know what the numbers are for Nokia handsets vs. Apple iPod/iPhone/iTouch devices, but I would bet real money that if you qualified the numbers with "daily usage" the Nokia handsets would be far and away more than the iDevices. Further qualify it with "able to play music" and we will start to see some interesting numbers (by the way, if you know where these stats are, I would love to see them). But there also exists a huge percentage of the "people owning phones able to play music" that either do not know about this feature, or ignore it entirely and also carry an iPod around with them. Why? Because Apple has done a superlative job in marketing the ease and usefulness of the iPod as a music player.

In my next piece, I will explore a possible option for innovating in the online music arena, and how only something that is revolutionary will take the reigns away from the DRM-laden iTunes store.