Nokia unlimited free music comes to Australia and Singapore
It is difficult to go wrong by having too much music to give away. Nokia obviously understood that when they designed their free unlimited music program, soon to be available in Australia and Singapore.
Nokia’s new music service offers unlimited music from the four major music labels and from many independents. The music can still be legally retained and used by the purchaser after their yearly contract with Nokia has expired. The individual music tracks can be downloaded free to the Nokia phone and to a single computer. The price of the music is included in the price of the phone and service.
The new service, dubbed Comes With Music, which was recently previewed in Great Britain and received a good reception, is continuing its worldwide rollout in Australia and Singapore, and is soon to follow suit in Europe and the United States. The announcement was made at the annual MidemNet digital music expo in Cannes, France, according to a Reuters story.
Tero Ojanpera, the head of entertainment and communities at Nokia, said, “The next two countries which we are going to roll out in the next 10 weeks are going to be in Asia, in Australia and Singapore. We’ll be launching there in the first quarter of 2009, in February and March. In 2009 we will also be looking at the United States and Latin America. That’s the plan.”
In order to give away the music, Nokia needed to secure rights agreements with both the recorded music side of the business and the publishing side. Ojanpera said the group had recently secured a breakthrough on a pan-European publishing deal. This is what will allow them to roll the plan out in Europe. Presumably, a similar rights deal is in the works for the United States.
It is not known how well sales of the phones involved in the free music offering are going. It is known that the single British retailer of the phones cut prices on at least one of the phones during the introductory period, and that Nokia is considering offering some additional content for the phone in return for advertising, such as music news and videos.
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