Music Ally

Sony Ericsson has launched its PlayNow Plus unlimited music service in Brazil, making the country the first in Latin America where the service has gone head to head with Nokia’s Comes With Music.

Operator Vivo has bagged exclusivity until the end of the year on the PlayNow Plus-enabled W508 Walkman handset, which will come with 1,000 songs preloaded, and free access to the music service for six months. After that time, though, users will have to pay a monthly subscription fee to continue using PlayNow Plus.

Sony Ericsson says it will launch three more handsets with the service bundled in the first quarter of next year, as well as partnering with other operators.

Comes With Music and PlayNow plus have yet to launch, but analysts are already predicting big numbers for the respective unlimited mobile music services of Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

Specifically, TNS Technology estimates that this category of services could result in British consumers downloading 2.1 billion tracks a year, cutting piracy but accelerating the decline of CD sales.

It’s worth digging into how the market research firm came up with that figure though (a gold star if you just shouted ‘market research?’). TNS apparently asked more than 1,000 people whether they were interested in signing up to these services, and if so, how many tracks they’d download a month.

More than a quarter expressed interest, and the average number of tracks they thought they’d download was 64 a month. In other words, that’s 768 songs a year per person, although apparently the figure was double for 16-24 year-olds.

“If replicated across the UK, that would equal 2.1bn tracks downloaded a year,” notes The Guardian, while also reporting the survey’s findings that 45% of users would buy fewer CDs as a result of using these services, 47% would buy fewer downloads from digital stores, and 38% would “reduce” their use of illegal file-sharing sites.

So, the headline 2.1 billion figure is based entirely on people who say they’d be interested in these services guessing how much they might download a month. Highly speculative, in other words, although TNS has been transparent about the methodology behind its prediction.

That ‘47% of users would buy fewer digital downloads’ stat is interesting, though – it seems unlimited mobile services might cannibalise existing digital sales more than CDs.

Early today, Sony Ericsson confirmed details of its new unlimited music download service, PlayArena plus. Omnifone is running the service, which will launch first in Sweden with mobile operator Telenor this year, before rolling out to other countries next year.

We talked to Omnifone CEO Rob Lewis this afternoon, to get some more details, and clarify certain points. He’s characteristically bullish about the deal, as you’d expect. “Walkman is an iconic brand in terms of music, and Sony Ericsson’s handsets have the best audio quality, and in terms of full-track music downloads from operator portals, they take in excess of 50% of the market.”

So is PlayNow plus just Omnifone’s MusicStation service under a different name? Not according to Lewis. In fact, it’s actually a rebranded version of the MusicStation Max service that was announced earlier this year.

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