Nokia buys time by giving away free music

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	Nokia buys time by giving away free music	By Sindre Lia, 4 December 2007

Nokia today launched a new market strategy that involves giving away free music to its customers. Is this what we've all been waiting for?

At the annual Nokia World conference today, Nokia outlined its vision for the mobile industry, predicting rapid change driven by the convergence of mobility and the internet. In his keynote address, Nokia president and CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo highlighted Nokia's commitment to be a driving factor in this trend.

"We are at the dawn of a new era in mobile communications driven by the rapid convergence of the internet and mobility, and Nokia is setting the pace of change. But with market leadership in an industry of this scale also comes responsibility," he said.

During the event, Nokia launched its "Comes with Music" marketing campaign, one of the first changes the company is effecting to maintain its mobile phone sales. Instead of coming up with real solutions for how to solve cost issues related to over-the-air music downloads, Nokia is spending some of the revenues from mobile phone sales to subsidize Universal Music Group's music catalog for one year per customer. We could have forgiven such an understandable marketing gimmick, if it hadn't been for Kallasvuo's speech about setting the pace of change.

The only change we see here can be found in Nokia's marketing strategy, while the technological challenges have yet again been set aside by the Finnish manufacturer. If Amazon can come up with an included solution to sell eBooks wirelessly, why can't a company aiming for the mobile service throne do the same for music downloads? We're just wondering.

Still, for Europeans looking into buying an N-series handset, free music from Universal will be an additional incentive to shell out a few hundred bucks for a smartphone. We've never been huge fans of Nokia's strategy of tying Symbian's S60 OS to every single multimedia phone though, as we would rather be able to choose clean and lean music phones with great battery life like the Sony Ericsson Walkman phones, and then free music on top of that.