Nokia “Comes With Music”

Credit to Nokia for walking where others are only talking. We all know that music buying is a broken system. We’ve all heard the solutions on offer: suing the bastards in one country, threatening Internet connection cut-off in another, and claiming that advertising will pick up the slack wherever pundits draw breath. Nokia has decided to fight free with free and “give” the music away. Thursday night, after months of speculation, Comes With Music was unveiled at the glamorous Koko Club in London.

Comes With Music is a one year subscription that ties unlimited free music to a variety of Nokia phones. The flagship model is the 5800, a touch-screen model that will be endlessly compared to the iPhone. Subscribers to the service can download music to their heart’s content and at the end of the year keep it. The four majors are licensing their material as well as many of the major indies, so breadth and depth isn’t going to be an issue. But there are limits: the files are WMA not MP3 and have DRM - just as all the labels have dropped it. It will only play on the mobile phone or a PC. To burn tracks to a CD requires buying an additional license. Of course, Apple have a similar walled eco-system but also have the advantage of being a very smart niche manufacturer with one of the world’s best industrial designers and a flawless marketing philosophy. Nokia, on the other hand, is the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer and doesn’t have either a great designer or marketing. Personally, I don’t buy from iTunes because of the limitations and I won’t be subscribing to Comes With Music for the same reason. But I support the fact that Nokia, with their massive global scale, is attempting a solution that gives the audience what they clearly want while enabling musicians to get paid.

Let’s Talk About Sex
Have you noticed how iPhone owners like to put their phone on the table? How they like to fondle it? I haven’t seen such phone-envy since the late 80s in Hong Kong, when the background sound in every location was the clunk of mobiles hitting the tabletop so everyone could marvel at the clunkee. But to me the really innovative design is at Sony-Ericsson; some of the Walkman phones are the best industrial design of the last three years. Against this, the Nokia 5800 looks ordinary. I won’t be clunking it on the table.

But as the great scientist Richard Feynman said, “What do you care what other people think?” Because after 15 minutes playing with the 5800 I was in love. Smaller than the iPhone, it was designed to be operated with one hand. Finally, the music system, from download to playing, is simple and intuitive. It can play movies. It supports both keyboard typing and handwriting. It will record video up to the limit of the memory. Like the iPhone, it’s essentially a PDA that makes phone calls – with the added advantage that you can put your four most frequent contacts into a bar on the home page, allowing instant phone calls, texting or email. It also has very good stereo speakers, which I dread having to suffer from chavs on the Underground.

Will.I.Am – Visionary

Although Nokia marketing isn’t flawless, they pulled the excellent stunt of bringing Will.I.Am on stage. Like all music stars, he started talking as though he had nothing planned, stopping in mid-sentence as though words were strangers to his mouth. But consider what he said: that the four minute song is a function of the technology it served, the vinyl disc and the CD. Since the Internet is infinite, what is an album nowadays? “Is a song four minutes any more? I don’t think so.”

He threw up his web site for the song “Yes We Can”, written earlier this year for Barack Obama specifically for the Internet. After it was released he invited the world to make and upload their own version. He clicked to the resulting page, two portraits of him and Obama, but made up of everyone’s contributions, so that as the cursor passed over each face individual contributions blew up and became the lead audio version.

So, he reasoned. If you can do that, why can’t you treat a song the same way? At a certain point, there might be a link into another piece of music, or when it’s played in a club the dancers could take a photo of themselves and upload it into the track, so their image becomes part of the song. This, he said, was what Black Eyed Peas were grappling with as they record their new album here in London – redefining the song.

In parting, he said that the Obama song was given away on the Net because not everything is about money. “You’re supposed to make change with music.” Let’s see if Comes With Music achieves that.

Will.i.am with job description