Nokia wants to find some method in the madness that is India’s promising mobile value-added services market with the launch of its Music Store service. It has roped in key stakeholders such as music labels and retailers for the service. This, it hopes, will legitimise digital music purchase and improve the revenue streams for the partners.
Music on the mobile phone has already become a bigger business than offline physical music. The market for mobile music was Rs 1,115 crore ($228 million) as against Rs 829 crore ($168 million) for CDs and cassettes, according to a 2008-09 Soundbuzz report.
Partners that Nokia already has on board include international music labels such as Universal Music Group, Sony Music, EMI and Warner, and Indian labels such as T-Series, Yashraj Music, Venus and Saregama. Tying up with Indian Music Industry, with 150 music companies under its umbrella, has been an enabler too. Regional consortia partnering for the service are GIRI (south India) and Phoneytunes (north India).
While logging on to music.nokia.co.in will be required to purchase songs off the Music Store, consumers will also have an offline channel to reach out for the three million international and Indian (including regional) soundtracks that Nokia has catalogued so far. They can buy vouchers from Nokia’s retail outlets and a few other music chains, apart from inbox vouchers that come with all XpressMusic handsets and a few Nseries and Eseries devices such as the N97, N86, E71 and E63.
For those on the lookout for an Internet connection to download songs off the store, Nokia will facilitate the service through laptops with Internet connection kept at the retail outlets. One of its retail partners, Planet M, is turning its stores Wi-Fi, which will boost access further.
Nokia India Director (marketing) Vineet Taneja puts down the task of digitising the content on board as one of the challenges that also delayed Nokia’s plans to launch, unlike the rapid roll out in the other 20 countries over the last few months. For now, Nokia is not encouraging single track purchases, as the vouchers come with a bundled offer of 50 songs and above. “We wanted to bypass the credit payment gateway for now, since not many in India are comfortable using credit cards over the internet,” says Taneja.
However, while the music labels may have it better than usual, not many consumers will be able to use the service as yet because it is limited to a few handset models. Taneja is not too worried. Not only will Nokia be coming out with various offshoots in time, “by 2010, almost all of our devices will be able to access the service. Right now a few million people will still be accessing it through the available handsets,” says he. Later this year, Nokia will introduce its ‘Comes with Music’ phones which will allow users unlimited access to its Music Store for a year. Advertising for the service will begin next month, along with ads for its new series of XpressMusic.