Hello Symbian-Guru readers, Olly here with a special opinion piece. Well, really I don’t know if it’s special per se, but it is an opinion, and The Guru has kindly given me some space to talk to you all about something very near and dear to my heart: Music. As you might have seen recently, Warner Music, one of the big 4 record labels, has signed on with Nokia’s Comes With Music initiative, and also listed their music library in the Nokia Music Store.
**NOTE** This is a guest piece from Ollywompus, who periodically contributes here on Symbian-Guru. You can read more from Ollywompus by clicking here. You can read his personal blog here.
Based on the conversations that Ricky has had with Nokians, Comes With Music will essentially be setup exactly like a regular Nokia Music Store account, only with everything listed as ‘free’. Thus, signing Warner Music is the 3rd step of the 4 step process to getting somewhere with Comes With Music, the 4th being the final nail in the record label coffin, the signing of EMI. Once that happens, there is very little to stop Nokia from launching the service.
Only, I think there SHOULD be some things that will make them pause, because I honestly, truly, 100% feel that the service is not going to work out very well for them, and there is one reason why:
There’s not enough innovation there to drag people away from iTunes.
In the geeked out mobile world that this blog is a part of, we all spend a lot of time talking about (or trying to avoid talking about) comparisons between the iPhone and (insert name of phone). Like it or not (I find it unfortunate), the iPhone has become the centerpiece of mobile discussion – you can’t hardly read a review anymore without some sort of iPhone comparison being made. Similarly, when you think of (legal) digital music downloads, iTunes occupies the mind space (and presently the market share). If you talk about buying music, and you aren’t talking about buying CD’s, it’s even become common speech to simply say “grab it off iTunes”. Is iTunes the greatest service in the world? No, it certainly has its flaws. Most of the store is still largely DRM’d (iTunes Plus is not even close to a good percentage of the store), it’s app based (meaning that if you don’t have the app installed, you can’t access the store), and in the end, it’s really only designed to work with iPods (although there are workarounds for other devices, these aren’t really mainstream and easy).
So why is it, with these obvious flaws, that iTunes has so dominated the market for digital downloads? It’s simple: iTunes/iPod (think of the two in concert) offer an unparalleled double-whammy to the average consumer. You buy an iPod, you plug it in, you install iTunes. From there, it is a completely brainless process to buy music. You click “buy” and the music is downloaded and sync’d to your iPod. Easy as can be. And while other companies have come out with similarly easy solutions, because Apple got there first, they standout. To dislodge Apple shouldn’t be Nokia’s intent. But to steal market share from them should be, otherwise why bother with the enormous undertaking that is the ‘Comes With Music’ initiative? Despite the back and forth that we’ve seen on the matter, I’m not entirely convinced this is a hugely profitable undertaking for Nokia. I don’t think they are losing money, as many people have speculated, but I’m sure it’s a slim, slim margin after paying the fees that the record companies are offering.
With that in mind, I’ve been brainstorming on a few things that Nokia needs to get right, and some ways that they could innovate, that would truly make this a desirable service. In no particular order:
-Forget sideloading from an app. There’s nothing wrong with sideloading itself, and in fact it’s still my preferred method of buying an album off of iTunes even though I own the iPod Touch and could do it wirelessly. But I don’t want to install an app to browse music. Instead, I picture something entirely different: why can’t I have the iTunes store experience in a browser? And no, I don’t mean something like Amazon (which isn’t terrible), where you browse a website in the old fashioned way, and then download the music you want. I mean actual, sideloading from a browser app, perhaps something running on Adobe’s Air platform. Web apps used to be clunky and crappy (and many of them still are). But if you’ve checked out Adobe’s Photoshop Express recently, you truly begin to see how well a web app could work. Imagine being near any computer, logging into a web app, buying an album, and sideloading it to my device. If Nokia wants to start the transformation to a web company, this would be a great place to start.
-Keep it in the cloud. This is a big one, and in innovation terms would shoot them to the top of the charts in my opinion. What if that web app I mentioned wasn’t just a portal to a music store – it was a portal to YOUR music as well? Nokia’s music plans include keeping the music both on device, and on a computer, but what if, instead, the music wasn’t tied to either? Here’s the scenario I imagine: I download a song over 3G onto my phone. Great, it’s there, I listen to it, bada bing bada boom. I then login to Nokia’s “Comes With Music” web app, move to my library, and there’s the song as well. On the back-end, while I downloaded the song to my phone, a copy was also put into my ’storage locker’ as well. Forget syncing back from my phone to my computer, forget re-downloading it – it’s automatic because it’s done server side. I imagine a service where, when I buy a ‘Comes With Music’ phone, I am allotted a certain amount of cloud storage in an online music store. I have the option of purchasing more storage on the cheap as well, but most people would probably be fine with say 10-15GB (yes, there are those of us who have way more than that, but I think that the average consumer is still well below that). The final tie-in? If there is a song on my music locker that I don’t have on my phone (say one I purchased through the online store, not through my phone), there is a simple menu item in the music player that allows me to access and download on demand any of those songs. (Editor’s note – Could this be a future feature of Nokia’s recently launched Files on Ovi? There *is* a music streaming feature.)
-Improve music quality in phones. This is a big one for me. Even barring all of the other reasons that I have not gotten into using my phone as a dedicated app (the transfer process is horrible at the moment), the quality on the phone sucks. There are two things I don’t particularly like about playing music on my phone: first off, the actual sound quality is garbage compared to even the iPod, which isn’t the paragon of sound either. Secondly, if I’m listening to a track and am moving about the UI, the sound has a tendency to skip, and this is just unacceptable. If you truly want me to believe that my phone is my jack of all trades, it needs to be competent at those trades, not simply capable of the barest minimum. The only phone I have ever used by Nokia that doesn’t do this is the 5310, a dumb-phone with great sound since it uses a dedicated audio processor. If you are going to release a phone with ‘Comes With Music’ then that audio processor is simply a requirement. Oh, and a 3.5mm jack, although Nokia definitely has gotten better about that.
-Finally, do away with DRM!!!! If you can’t, then don’t bother. I mentioned Amazon earlier in this post, and I have to say bravo to them because they HAVE won my business away from iTunes, simply through the innovation of selling DRM-free music. I routinely use 4 different operating systems (5 if you want to call it ‘OSX Mobile’ on my Touch). I need to know that I can play my music anywhere, whether it’s OSX, Windows, Linux, Symbian or my iPod. If I pay for music, then I expect to own it. I have no problem paying for music, in fact I pay for it much more often then I download it illegally anymore, but if you are telling me where and how I can play that music back then I’m not buying it – I’m renting it. I personally, rather than the whole “1 year free of music” deal, would be happy to pay for my music through Nokia and know that I can take it wherever, whatever device, if I want to. The 12 months free is a great gimmick, but if at the end of that I can’t burn it to a CD, or I give it up if I switch phones, no thanks. If I can’t take those tracks I’ve downloaded to my computer and play them back in any music software, on any platform, then no thanks.
I realize that Nokia is going to launch, regardless of the ranting that I may do, but honestly even as big of Nokia fan as I am, I have zero interest in this launch. There just isn’t anything compelling enough to me to say “sure, I’ll give up my iPod Touch and use my phone”. And in the case of the sound quality issues, there are actually reasons that push me the other way entirely.
I’ve ranted a lot to people about Nokia’s lack of marketing in the U.S., and their sound drubbing at the hands of Apple’s marketing department every time I turn around. But with this initiative, it’s not the usual case where the better product is losing due to bad marketing – it’s the case where they aren’t making a better product at all, simply more of the same rehashed mp3 player territory we’ve been stuck in for years. Go hard or go home Nokia – otherwise why bother?
-Olly
This has been a guest piece on Symbian-Guru from Ollywompus. You can read more of his writings here at Symbian-Guru here and here. Olly’s personal blog is located here.
