Music Ally

16.40: I’m sat here in the Koko venue in Camden for Nokia’s Remix event. Suitably uplifting dubby-trance music is playing, the bar is a hubbub of journalists drinking as much free champers as possible before having to sit down, and there are lots of Nokia people looking slightly nervous. Possibly because they’re getting the bar bill.

Yes, it’s Nokia Remix, the event at which Nokia will (hopefully) announce the final details of its Comes With Music rollout in the UK, although strong rumours suggest they’ll also show off their new ‘Tube’ phone for the first time too. It’s all due to kick off at 5pm, and assuming my HSDPA dongle doesn’t catch on fire, I’ll be liveblogging it.

Stay tuned. Oh, and this post will be updated in chronological order, so you’ll need to click the link underneath and keep refreshing to get updates. Assuming that’s what you’re doing, of course.

16.50: Artists listed on the welcome PowerPoint slide on the main screen: DMX, Hadouken!, Glen Phillips, Horst Jankowski. I don’t think any of them are playing the post-event party though – Keane and Ida Maria have earmarked that. Who is Horst Jankowski anyway?

Anyway, it’s more of a consumer press event, so expect details on Comes To Music’s launch pricing in the UK and other news around that, but probably not the nitty gritty of who’s getting paid what on the licensing side. It’ll be interesting to see if EMI has signed up at the last minute, to give Nokia a full set of major labels.

17.00: Okay, people are taking their seats, it’s almost showtime. The light are dimming…

17.05: Nokia’s music device portfolio boss Jo Harlow and technical guru Tero Ojanpera have taken the stage, to whoops from the (hopefully) Nokia people at the back. They’re having a slightly stilted scripted conversation about their favourite bands (Bangles and AC/DC – I’ll leave you to decide which is whose).

17.06: “You guys in Finland have a sense of humour, right?” says Jo. Early contender for quote of the night. An early theme also seems to be emerging – they’ve mentioned playlists, sharing and community – will there be more social features to Comes With Music than have already been revealed?

17.08: First mention of “an industry in transition”. Who had 8 minutes and 17 seconds in the sweepstake? Good one.

17.10: A vote of hands among the audience on how many of us still buy CDs. Quite a few. How many of our kids buy them? Not many (mine has an excuse – he’s 17 months old). But Tero gets to the point – mentioning the ’sharing’ word again. He’s giving the example of an Indian girl recording what’s on the radio using her mobile, then playing it back to her family. Quick, someone set the RIAA on her! Or the Indian equivalent, obviously.

17.12: Tero’s talking about having a sharing, social experience with music on your phone again. This is interesting – a lot of the talk around Comes With Music has focused purely on the downloads, but it seems community may be a big part of it. Perhaps Omnifone MusicStation-style playlist sharing, with a side order of social networking?

17.15: Right, here we go. Nokia has just announced its Tube phone, at last. Jo has one in her pocket, in fact. But before getting it out, she talks about some recent market research, about music being “the number one way young people define themselves… it’s social currency for this age group”. She’s quoting Habbo Hotel’s recent survey, by the way.

Ooh, last month, Nokia sold 10 million 5310 XpressMusic handsets. Last month. Alone. But the big figure is the 300 million music-capable Nokia phones sold so far, while it’s rolled out the Nokia Music Store to 11 countries around the world – the latest being Spain this week.

But what do consumers want from their new music phones? “We want more memory, we want better speakers, we want more music, and we want it loud!” says Jo. Cue promo video.

17.17: Right, the Tube (also known as 5800). It’s got a new drop-down media bar interface to access your music and other content. You can access it whatever you’re doing on the phone, by tapping a certain point on the screen (it’s touchscreen, in case you hadn’t heard that). When you’re in a country with a Nokia Music Store, it’ll take you directly to that.

Built-in surround speakers – apparently a big feature in Latin America and India, where kids want to play songs to their friends. And on the Number 78 bus in London, in my experience. “These are the loudest and most powerful speakers on a mobile phone today,” she says. I’m never catching the bus again.

It has 8GB of removable memory, a graphical equaliser, it supports “all of the main audio formats”, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and it works with Nokia’s new Nokia Music PC client.

It’s got a 3.2-inch touchscreen display capable of displaying 16 million colours. “This is the best colour screen you can buy on a mobile device,” says Jo. “It brings all forms of entertainment clearly and brilliantly into focus.” Quite a claim. Ooh, it’s VGA-resolution too.

17.21: Ah, it’s the 5800 XpressMusic, the name. First dig at Apple: “I know some people didn’t think Flash was important to have on a mobile device,” says Jo. Needless to say, the Tube’s browser supports Flash, unlike the iPhone. GPS is also built in, with the Nokia Maps software.

You want more specs? 3.2-megapixel camera, a TV-out port, and it ties in with Nokia’s own Share on Ovi service. Ah, playlist-sharing – you can create a playlist of songs on the Tube, then share them via MMS, online sharing and Bluetooth. What does sharing a playlist mean though? I think it’s just the list of songs you’ve been listening to, not the song files themselves. Imagine…

17.24: Now Jo is talking about how Nokia has put a human face on the Tube’s touchscreen. You can choose four contacts – friends, family, colleagues, whoever. “Those four people become your Contacts Bar – you have a complete digital record of your relationship,” she says. Texts, calls, picture messages are included, but you can also sign up to their latest Facebook status updates or Share On Ovi pics. Interesting stuff. It will come back to music later, I’m sure, but this is all relevant to understanding the handset’s likely appeal.

17.27: Four ways to input on the device. It’s got a stylus, and will support handwriting recognition in 60 languages – apparently most useful for countries with their own alphabets. Secondly, an on-screen QWERTY keyboard. And also an on-screen numeric keypad. And there’s also a plectrum.

Hang on? A plectrum? A guitar pick? Apparently so. That’s a first.

17.29: So, “is it affordable?”. The suggested retail price of the 5800 XpressMusic is 279 Euros without subsidy or taxes. “That means this device is about half the price of competitive touch devices in the market today. And it certainly means that it is THE best touch value proposition in the market.”

It will begin shipping…. “shortly”.

17.32: Tero’s back now, to talk about Nokia’s wider music offering. The Music Store first – more than five million tracks are currently available. The second strand: Nokia Music PC Client, which is essentially Nokia’s own iTunes app, allowing people to manage their music collections on their PCs. You can apparently drag and drop CDs to your phone, and it’ll handle the ripping process seamlessly. And, of course, there’s Comes With Music as the fourth strand to Nokia’s music strategy.

Back to the Nokia Music Store, and trends. 35% of the visitors to the store are coming through mobile. One third of the downloads from those stores are happening over the air, either using 3G or Wi-Fi. “It is really showing that people are not just exploring, they are buying over the air,” says Tero.

Younger demographics tend to use mobile more to access the store, and older users tend more to PC. Rock, dance and folk users like back catalogue tracks, but rap and hip-hop listeners prefer the latest stuff.

He drills down into dance listeners – they tend to start listening to stuff on Wednesday, then Thursday “they hit the club, continue Friday, Saturday and then chill out on Sunday afternoon”. This is Tero speaking still, they haven’t parachuted Craig David in.

17.38: Apparently the United Arab Emirates has just gone live with the Nokia Music Store too – the first deployment in the Middle East.

17.40: Back to Comes With Music. Tero restates the fact that you get to keep all your songs when your contract runs out. Apologies if you had problems accessing the blog for the last few minutes. We’ve kicked the goblins in the server, it should have been cranked up again now.

17.40: EMI has signed up! That’s the full set of majors, just in time. “But we also need more music,” says Tero. The Orchard, Beggars Group, IODA, Ministry of Sound and PIAS Digital are all on board too.

Tero is going through the publishing deals too – a host of major publishers, plus the MCPS-PRS here in the UK. “We will have 100% chart coverage here in the UK when we go live,” he says.

17.44: Okay, how much will it cost? The 5310 XpressMusic is the first CWM handset, being sold exclusively here in the UK by Carphone Warehouse. Tero asks the crowd how much they’d pay. “£300? £200? It’s going to be £129.95 at the Carphone Warehouse on October 16. Be there.”

Also Nokia N95 8GB will support CWM, while the 5800 (the Tube) will be CWM when it comes out in the first quarter of next year. They just said “soon” for its release date earlier.

Comes With Music will come in two subscription flavours – one for 12 months, and one for 18 months – the latter at operator requests, since that’s the length of many of the contracts they sell. “We will add other lengths if there is demand in the market,” he says.

17.48: Tero shows a demo video of how Comes With Music will work – users will get a leaflet inside their handset box with a PIN code. Type that into the Nokia Music Store on their PC, and “all the prices disappear”.

Outside the UK, the countries that already have the Nokia Music Store will be “first on the list” to get Comes With Music. No dates yet.

Tero has his own playlist on screen – Rick Springfield, Stevie Wonder, Einstein, Slapbak, Erik B & Rakim… Now he’s welcoming “a great visionary artist” on-stage. Oh, it’s the bloke from the Black Eyed Peas. Will.I.Am. I thought it was going to be Dave Stewart, given his links with Nokia.

17.51: Will speaks. “I have to thank Nokia for ramping up the efforts in saving the music industry as we know it,” he says. “Where I’m from, in America, there’s no stores to buy music. Literally, there’s probably two. Virgin Megastore in Hollywood, and Virgin Megastore in New York. That’s it. And there’s iTunes. That’s cool.”

Right now, seventeen Nokia people are running around backstage screaming “OFF MESSAGE! OFF MESSAGE!” Probably.

Back to Will, talking about dreaming about signing a record deal, and how contracts are all based on the way music used to be sold. And how the internet is a graveyard, where album covers get compressed down. And stuff. “What is an album nowadays?” he asks. “Am I going to make something that gets compressed down into a little file and gets opened up on the internet? Or can I do something creative?”

17.54: The Black Eyed Peas are recording in London right now, trying to think what an album should be. Clue: Leave off the comedy track about Fergie’s humps this time.

But Will’s saying he’s interested in more technology stuff – “I can make a song that when you press ‘3′, it alters it,” he says, referring to mobile keypads. And now he’s playin the ‘Yes We Can’ track he made for Barack Obama earlier in the year, and put on YouTube.

“It was made for the internet, it was made for people to share, and engage, comment to it,” he says. And goes on to talk about the website built for the song, where people can upload their images to be a part of a version of the video, where Will’s face is created from all the images. www.hopeactchange.com/mosaic is the address, I think, you have to see it to make sense of my jumbled explanation.

“Just pressing play and hearing a song from zero to four minutes? That’s yesterday,” he says. “Now I can write a song that when I sing ‘Where is the love?’, you can click on that and find much more information. There could be songs within songs. Your imagination can go as far as you want.”

When the song starts talking about humps, you could… No, I’ll stop.

18.00: Now it’s time for a Q&A. First question: more info on Comes With Music please. “No limitations,” says Tero. “Everything you see in the store, you can download. You can keep the music on one PC and one phone at a time. If you lose your phone, we keep track of what you’ve got and you can get that back.”

18.04: How will the sharing side work? “If you have a Comes With Music device and I have a Comes With Music device, we already have all the rights to the music, so we can legally share music with each other. It’s possible in the first version, so I can pass a song to you in a very nice way,” says Tero. Sharing between CWM users from day one, interesting.

18.05: What about the operators? “We are in very close discussions with the operators,” says Tero. “If an operator wants to offer Comes With Music and align that with their contract, as I was saying with 18 months, that’s possible now. We are in discussions, and there will be more news to follow there.”

18.06: What if you want Comes With Music on an existing device – will Nokia sell it as a subscription excluding the device? “At the moment, it’s Comes With Music when you buy a device. At this point in time, we are not looking to the consumer to make a choice, it’s about a great package, value for money. Whether we will do other offerings in the future remains to be seen. But at the moment, Comes With Music device comes with the service.”

18.07: What about US and Japan? Tero again: “Next year we will have much more news to follow from different markets.” Straight bat.

18.08: How much has the 5310 hanset’s price been marked up? Tero bats this back too. It’s about creating a great value package apparently, not marking up a phone. Of course, you can just go and look on Carphone’s website and see how much a CWM-less 5310 costs to figure this answer out.

18.09: Last question – what’s the limits on the amount of downloads one person can have. “Unlimited access to the Nokia Music Store,” says Tero. So unlimited downloads? “Unlimited access to the Store,” he says. Is that just semantics, or is there something deeper in there? Anyway, we’re done.

Tags: Comes With Music, nokia, remix, tube

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Digital Music News, Music Ally Feature, T.V, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.