Nokia's mobile music service threatens all comers

WITH THE CONCLUSION of deal with Warner Music phone giant Nokia has moved one step closer to achieving its objective of offering a comprehensive music download service to handset purchasers. The only major supplier left unsigned is EMI.

Once Nokia has signed EMI, its 'Comes with Music' service will become a serious contender in the digital music download stakes.

Observers constantly compare any new music offering with Apple's Itunes facility but this development is more subtle. Once all four labels are signed up, Nokia will become a direct competitor with its own customerbase – the network operators.

There are other possible repercussions, too. For example, will Nokia be able to resist the temptation to build 'Comes with Music' deep into Symbian, now that it has taken complete control of that OS? Like the Beast did with Internet Explorer, for instance.

The most worrying aspect to 'Comes with Music' from an operator's perspective is that it is seriously consumer-friendly. Potential purchasers won't have to jump through hoops just to buy a specific track.

Instead they'll already be signed up to a viable music download service thanks to the fact that 'Comes with Music' will be built in.

The pair that probably has most to worry about are Omnifone which created the Musicstation service and Vodafone, which licensed it.

Omnifone recently told the INQ that it has a much larger potential catchment for its service since it works over 2.5G (GPRS) as well as 3G. Plus, instead of using MP3 as the file format, it utilises EACC which is eight times faster to download. And you can store eight times as many tracks.

Omnifone is hoping that the Offical UK Charts Company will start to compile a separate chart for music downloads which will count Musicstation downloads, too.

To try to encourage take up of Musicstation, Vodafone recently released new tariffs which come with Musicstation bundled in. There's also a hint that the Musicstation software might get buried much deeper into Vodafone handsets in future.

Another interesting development is that Omnifone is working on a PC client for its service, so – like most of its rivals – users can listen to their music on both their handsets and their PCs.

A rumour which recently reached the INQ is that Omnifone might look at the Cliq service for handsets which hooked FM radio stations up with music downloads.

Cliq failed because the downloads had to be 'side-loaded' onto handsets rather than coming directly OTA (Over-The-Air) like Musicstation.

A combination of Musicstation with Cliq would also act as a serious alternative to Nokia's Visual Radio offering which never really caught on with the radio stations. µ