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CTIA: Dave Stewart helps Nokia find its rhythm
Stuart O'Brien at CTIA in Las Vegas Apr 1 2008, 1:13am
Eurythmics legend heading Nokia's 'artist advisory council' as Comes With Music nears launch.
Nokia has enlisted the help of musician and producer Dave Stewart as part of an 'artist advisory council' charged with discovering what makes the creative mind tick.
The Finnish company, which is investing heavily in mobile music via its full-track download store and Comes With Music initiative, hopes the knowledge gained through people like Stewart will help it develop better business models.
Stewart's involvement was revealed today by Tero Ojanpera, Nokia's EVP of entertainment and communities, at Billboard's Mobile Entertainment Live! conference here at CTIA Wireless 2008.
In an interview conducted by Ralp Simon, Ojanpera said Nokia was looking to forge similar relationships in other fields of entertainment, such as the movies and sports, as part of its ongoing move into content servives under the Ovi brand.
Comes With Music, which will bundle 12 months of unlimited music downloads with each NOkia music handset sold, will be the next major Nokia content service to go live (sometime in 2H08), complete with a marketing campaign worth 'tens of millions' of dollars.
Universal is so far the only label to sign up to the initiative (offering 2m tracks), but Ojanpera said negotiations are going well with other labels.
Ojanpera said: "Comes With Music is undoubtedly a disruptive model, but it's a model that can take the music industry to the next level. It's a game changer. If well sell 100 million Comes With Music handsets, that's a huge upside for the labels."
It's undertsood that Nokia will pay each label $80 for each handset sold as part of the scheme. But it appears that full-track downloads is just the beginning of the Nokia music story, which is as much about social networking as anything else.
Ojanpera continued: "Offering songs from a music store is a commodity business in the long run - we want to build communities up around content and artist. If we don't lean forward the business isn't going to grow."
Interestingly, Ojanpera also suggested the Comes With Music model could be applied to other types of content, with video one area subject to internal discussion.
