Nokia Commits Itself to Comes With Music Scheme

Nokia has reaffirmed its commitment to the "Comes With Music" music download service that apparently managed to enroll only 23,000 subscribers since it was launched back in November 2008.

Comes With Music provides access to several million tracks for a year which the users can keep forever but it is only available on two mobile phones, the Nokia 5310 and the Nokia N95, both from Orange.

Rob Taylor, vice president of Nokia Music, told the Telegraph that the company was happy with the way the public responded to CMW. The scheme was rolled out during last year's X-Factor Music show by Carphone Warehouse and backed by a significant marketing budget.

Interestingly, Taylor released some data about the characteristics of British CMW users. They are apparently more engaged than the average mobile phone user (ed: doesn't know how that would tally against smartphone users) and download around 10 tracks a day during the first month, with 90 percent of these being from the back catalogue rather than new tracks.

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This will, for sure, comfort the "long tail" theory and according to Taylor is something is encouraging for the music industry. But it doesn't explain why Nokia has yet to release the Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic with Comes With Music bolted on.

Noklia has already launched the service with the Nokia 5800 in countries like Brazil and Singapore. To make things worse, the smartphone has nabbed the title of best selling music player, having sold on average more than one million smartphones per month.

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Our Comments
Someone at Nokia clearly got it wrong by deciding not to launch the 5800 XM with CMW and certainly missed out on a few million pounds worth of revenues for this quarter. At the latest count, there were three Xpressmusic phones in the pipeline including the classy 5330 XM. Nokia though needs to be more proactive and release CMW on ALL its smartphones.

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