MUMBAI: The Nokia Music Store was officially launched in India, during the day long Nokia Music Connects conference at the Taj Lands End in Mumbai on Wednesday.
The Music Store has launched with a library of three million songs across 20 genres and in a variety of Indian languages. The service will be available on key devices during 2009 and will be extended to other Nokia devices by 2010.
The launch was heralded by an array of song and dance sequences during the post lunch session of the conference, attended by key executives from the music industry and allied sectors.
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Nokia has signed up India’s major independent labels including Tseries, Yashraj Music, Saregama, BIG Music and Venus; it has also partnered with India’s leading music body, the Indian Music Industry. Nokia also announced that its Comes with Music service would be arriving in India later this year.
The standard Nokia Music Store features are available for the Indian store, including the on-device mobile client for over-the-air downloads and PC client (Nokia Music) for downloads to the PC. Purchased tracks may be played back on the phone or via the PC and can be synced between the two, regardless of how they were downloaded.
The Nokia Music Store was previously available in ‘soft launch’ mode, with track purchase only available via vouchers. Vouchers were (and will be) available in the sales box of selected handsets (Nseries, Eseries and XpressMusic).
At the Music Connects conference, Nokia’s Head of Global Music, Elizabeth Schimel, talked about the progression of Nokia’s music strategy: The Nokia Music Store is available in over 20 countries, nine of which have the Comes with Music offering, and is continuing to roll out at a rapid pace. This represents the fastest ever roll out for a digital music service. While the Nokia Music service is global, being local is also very important to Nokia. In each country, Nokia hires local experts who understand local music tastes and trends, to help them get local music into the store and optimise the appeal of the Nokia Music Store for each individual country.
Schimel continued by noting that Nokia believed they ‘were crossing an important threshold in India’, because the company ‘has unique characteristics in India because of their technology and the strength of the Nokia brand’. Nokia is the number one trusted brand in India and Nokia hold a dominant market share in the country. The combination of this, together with the reach of Nokia’s Indian distribution channel and the breadth of the music catalog, will come together to ‘create value for the music industry’.
Schimel also shared some interesting figures for the Comes with Music service: Comes with Music acts a liberating force around the discovery of new music. Pay-as-you-go customers download, on average, from three different genres; Comes with Music customers, on average, download from eight different genres, and have much deeper use of the back catalog. Comes with Music customers typically use their mobile phone as their primary device for listening to and maintaining their music collection and 35 per cent of their downloads happen over the air.
Schimel concluded by noting that ‘consumer engagement around the content they love is the future of our business’.
