Music Ally

We recently revealed that Nokia’s Comes With Music service has only attracted 23,000 subscribers in the UK, and 4,500 subscribers in Singapore. Nokia then contacted us with some more figures, which gave a more positive spin to its music service highlighting, for example, that new Comes With Music users download an average of 200 to 300 tracks in the first few weeks. This kind of behavioural data is essential: there have been few legal music services launched in the western world which allow users to download an unlimited number of tracks to keep, so knowing exactly how many tracks people download will help labels and artists to understand whether these subscription models are more like premium radio; or a replacement for music buying. Nokia’s figures suggest that early stage users go mad, downloading a lot of mainly back catalogue music: 20 times more than buy back catalogue in the Nokia download store.  However, figures obtained by Music Ally paint a different picture. According to a royalty statement sent by Nokia to a label, UK users downloaded just over 1.5m tracks in the last month, which is an average of 61 songs per month per user. So if Nokia’s figures of 200 to 300 tracks ‘in the first few weeks’ is accurate then it’s clear that usage tails off quite dramatically.

Interestingly the situation is different in Singapore, where Nokia’s 4,500 subscribers downloaded 820,000 tracks last month: an average of 180 per person or three times more than the UK. There are a number of different factors which contribute to the relative success of CWM in Singapore when compared to the UK; but the largest single contributing factor must be the availaibility of decent CWM handsets in Singapore compared to the UK. For more details on the lessons learned by Nokia; and the hurdles still facing the company, download a copy of our Report here by signing up for a free two week trial.

Tags: Comes With Music, figures, nokia

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Digital Music News, Digital Music Research, Music Ally Feature. 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.