Comes With Conditions

“I’ve got Comes With Music for 12 months with my Nokia 5800…  I’m not complaining about free music, but as soon as the 12 months is up I’ll go straight back to iTunes. Half of my songs download properly, then half of them don’t… .”,                                                    - scissormetimbers, Whirlpool Forum, June, 14^th

From its release, Nokia’s Comes With Music (CWM) service has been an ambitious step by the handset manufacturer to develop unique customer services that diversify revenues as well as solidify customer loyalty to the brand.

In this sense, CWM has been designed as a ‘walled garden’; a virtual utopia of music choice, confined to particular handsets and particular software configurations.

But in the 12 months since CWM‘s UK launch, and its subsequent rollout across nine markets on four continents (including Australia), subscriber numbers have only reached 107,000 (23,000 in Australia since March 09).  

A combination of telco resistance (because of their own music offerings), a poor user experience by some subscribers, as well as locking files to particular handsets, have all played their part in building resistance to the offering. (Did anyone miss the irony of a mobile player restricting the mobility of its music service?)

In recent Music Minds research, there was a wide level of scepticism to the idea of mobile phones becoming the primary portable music player.  Device memory, battery power, interface design and menu navigation were all raised as practical concerns, let alone issues to do with data ownership, management and portability. 

Even if the concept is generally applauded for its comprehensiveness, the music retail market is simply too competitive for any brand, even one like Nokia, to prosper without a seamless ‘plug and play’ platform.

In a market devoid of iTunes, CWM would have gone some way to differentiating certain Nokia handsets (vis a vis Samsung, LG and Motorola) and, more importantly, taken a reasonable slice of the music retail market. But iTunes has conditioned the market into accepting a certain pricing model, a certain way of selecting music and a certain technology experience. iTunes might not be the perfect model (for users or artists), but the market has determined it’s the best we have, and the perception of seeing every third person on a train or bus with white earplugs spinning their way through a music library, is a powerful endorsement of the technology.

In recent days Nokia has been hammered by a ‘told you so’ sentiment, primarily driven by advocates of DRM-free music and open platform technology. Now a new perception game starts to play out, this one more dangerous for Nokia. Where once CWM was seen as innovative, now the public’s perception will be more circumspect. Like the negative perception that smothered Microsoft’s Zune player, Nokia has to quickly change perception by changing the user experience.