COMMENT: Mobile music is getting louder

News

Tim Green Jul 4 2008, 10:57am

Did you know that possibly the best place in the world to be old is a small village in Finland called Pukkila?

Why? Because of Onni Nurmi, a Finn who bequeathed his 780 shares in a rubber company called Nokia to the village when he died in 1962, stipulating it had to be used to look after the local pensioners.

The donation was forgotten until the 90s, by which time Nokia was a phone company and the bequest had increased 3,000 fold to be worth around £3 million.

I love the idea of Finnish pensioners dripping in bling and driving Hummers, but the reality is that Pukkila has used its cash to build beautiful housing and provide work for the local community. Very Finnish.

Of course, it has to thank the visionaries who changed Nokia’s focus from rubber to handsets for its good fortune. The ageing shareholders will be watching Nokia’s current strategy with great interest. As all ME readers will know, Nokia is using the moment of its greatest ever market share (40 per cent) to re-orientate itself from hardware to services.

This week it moved step closer to achieving its vision. Warner’s decision to join the Nokia "Comes With Music" bandwagon leaves just one major – EMI – left to be recruited. That’s impressive work from Nokia just six months after it unveiled the concept with the solitary backing of Universal. To remind you, Comes With Music offer’s a year’s worth of free music downloads on selected Nokia handsets.

The service complements Nokia’s download store, which has now launched in Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden and the UK.

I think it’s fair to say that the jury is still out on mobile full-track downloads. Nokia has yet to give out user or download numbers, neither has rival Omniphone, despite the impressive roll out of MusicStation. Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests none of the operator music stores are exactly pulling up trees. Do you know any ‘civilians’ that download songs from them?

But still the industry chips away. This week Verizon launched RealNetwork’s Rhapsody's subscription music service for $15 per month. The interesting tweak is that the copy of the song the user gets on PC will be an unprotected MP3.

It’s all been said before that wireless music has great potential, given mobile’s qualities of ubiquity and spontaneity. What’s lacking is public understanding. Well, I hear rumours that Nokia will spend unheard-of sums promoting Comes With Music later this year. That should be a good test.

Those Pukkila pensioners will be paying close interest. If Nokia ends up ‘owning’ digital music, they’ll be eating out every night. If not, it’s back to cold perch.