Nokia Music Store for SA
Nokia will launch will launch its Music Store in SA in the first quarter of next year, offering local users the opportunity to download digital music online. The move means Nokia is likely to beat fierce worldwide rival Apple to launch a fully fledged digital music download service for SA consumers.
Nokia SA GM Mathia Nalappan says the company has begun talks with SA record labels with a view to including local music on the SA version of the Nokia Music Store.
The store is available in 11 countries, most of them in Europe. Nalappan says Nokia plans to expand the store to 12 more countries in the next 12 months.
The Nokia Music Store is a direct rival to Apple’s popular iTunes Store. The two companies could end up going head-to-head in the SA market. Apple may have plans to launch the iTunes Store in SA, since a new version of the company’s iTunes music software allows South Africans to download software applications for the iPod Touch music player and new 3G-based iPhone.
Though no media content is available to SA consumers yet, local Apple fan and freelance technology journalist Brett Haggard says Apple could easily begin selling music and video locally. Provided Apple is able to get buy-in from the record labels, Haggard says he would not be surprised if Apple switched on music downloads in SA in the next few months.
Nokia says it has not yet decided how much it will charge South Africans to download music from its store. In the UK store, the first to launch in November 2007, downloads cost 80p a song. Most albums fetch £8 each. For the PC, a monthly full-track Web streaming subscription (no file downloads allowed) is £8/month.
The Nokia Music Store has 2m songs available from the big four record labels and a number of independent labels.
The music is only available wrapped in digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Microsoft. DRM is meant to stop people from sharing music with their friends, but for most people it could prove to be a big hassle: though it allows music to be shared between a user’s PC and his or her Nokia phone, it can’t be copied to a third-party music player, such as an Apple iPod.
The Nokia Music store has another serious drawback: on the PC, it works only with Windows and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, thus excluding the millions of people worldwide who prefer the open-source Mozilla Firefox or who run Linux or Apple’s Mac OS X operating systems.
Nalappan says Nokia is working to localise payment options. He says the company is considering a number of options, including partnering the mobile operators to use their billing systems. That would work only for contract customers, though, so Nokia is looking to develop credit card-based payments and prepaid vouchers as well.
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