Yesterday, we reported that Nokia’s Comes With Music service has 23,000 active users in the UK – a claim subsequently discussed at the Association of Independent Music’s London conference, and backed up by label sources at the event. Naturally, we asked Nokia if it could officially confirm the figures, and while the response was an unsurprising ‘no’, the company has revealed to Music Ally some other stats about its unlimited music service.”While we don’t have specific numbers to share, we have been very pleased with the Comes With Music launches around the world,” a spokesperson tells us.”It always takes time for new services to gain traction in the market and we’re confident that consumers who purchase Comes With Music are very satisfied with the service. We’ve seen a lot of promising trends that show Comes With Music is helping to expand the digital music industry for everyone, including labels, artists and publishers.”And those promising trends are…
- Comes With Music customers are downloading 200 to 300 tracks on average in the first few weeks
- They’re making regular visits back to check new music, as well as explore back catalogue and recommendations
- The majority of downloading is taking place via PC, but around 20% of downloads are Over The Air, which Nokia says is for “convenience downloads”
- A strong local content catalogue is proving to be an important aspect – accounting for around 35% of downloads in CWM markets
- Typical Comes With Music customers download tracks from seven genres, compared to the three genres for typical customers of the Nokia Music Store
- CWM customers are downloading 20 times more back catalogue than Nokia Music Store customers
The UK sales of Comes With Music handsets so far have been disappointing, according to numerous non-Nokia sources. However, it’s only fair to point out that CWM seems to be getting traction faster in other markets – notably Singapore – where it’s being pushed with the 5800 XpressMusic handset, unlike the UK.If Nokia is putting into practise the lessons learned from the UK rollout both there and elsewhere, it’s far too early to label Comes With Music a failure.
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