Report: Nokia's Comes With Music not selling very well in the UK
By Laura June 
posted April 22nd 2009 5:31PM
posted April 22nd 2009 5:31PM
After hearing initial reports that Nokia's Comes With Music subscription service was doing "okay," word on the streets is now... even less good. According to estimates released by Music Ally at an Association of Independent Music conference in London, Nokia's gotten about 23,000 subscribers to the service since it launched last October. That's not a great number, if it's anywhere near accurate... though Nokia has "refused to confirm" whether or not it is. Tim Grimsditch, head of Nokia's product marketing division added that it's "a very new business model, we're live in five markets and the numbers only mention one. We're going to continue to develop the model and fine tune how we market it." That said, the report can't be terribly heartening either way you slice it, and is rather reminiscent of N-Gage's niche market status if you ask us.
That's the most affirmative "refuse to confirm" I've seen in a while.
Lose the DRM and make it available in the US, and I'm getting it.
...why?
People can't seem to go without some kind of MUSIC service for more than 125 consecutive seconds these days. I mean, really, Nokia now? iTunes, Zune, Amazon, Wal*Mart, Napster, and so on and so on and so on... the last thing anyone on Earth needs is another way to buy music.
Because there's an easy available in any phone (well, at least any S60) store. Nobody got mobile downloads right until now. Maybe iTunes, but restricting it to one phone is not cool.
Lose the DRM and the weird name, n-gage I thought was pretty clever
Nokia needs to bring a lot of things to the US; there isn't one high-end Nokia phone that you can get subsidized directly from a major carrier, and along with that n-gage service is limited as well, maybe they couldn't get over their failed n-gage phone but the success of the iphone in gaming could have been theirs
There is a Nokia N95 in Canada that is carrier subsidized. I never knew Nokia sells music online. So, when the phone dies? or if I switch phones to some other brands, am i SOL?
My issues is that there are so many phones you just hook up to your computer or just put your media on mini SD cards to use. Why would I want a music service tied to my carrier.
The only other successful one would be the iphone, but that was because it existed for the ipods long before the phone came around.
If I want music on my phone, i'll just slap it onto my storage card.
Oh it was launched ?
hahahah
No Comment !
They just need to tweak it a bit. Change the name to "Comes With Torrentz" and see what happens.
figures...
Yup, especially as 'Comes with Music' is actually only available on the N96 - which no-one wants, the N95 8GB - which everyone has already - and the 5310 which is about a year and a half old.
http://www.comeswithmusic.com/uk/#/devices/
So it's a failure because it's not actually on any Nokia handsets that are selling just now, you know like the 5800 (which for some reason you show in your picture despite it not actually having a UK CWM version) which has shifted 3 million units? OK.
Honestly, I'm starting tho think that Americans should be banned from writing about Nokia.
Oops - it's a Nokia picture not an Engadget one.
That makes it tragic.
Fire the marketeers. NOW!
It's Nokia's own fault. Their marketing department is useless and the service comes on a very limited number of phones. It's Nokia that is restricting their own success. CWM was a nice idea, but, as with most things concering Nokia, the execution was laughable.
Bingo. They need to fire their marketing department now.
All of them.
Yep, I've been looking into Comes With Music for my wife as she's keen on building up her music library legally and aside from the obvious DRM problems the main issue is you can't get hold of the damn thing. There's only two phones in the UK that come with the service and both are on the Orange network. The N95 8GB is bloody expensive, a brick of a phone (especially these days), has rubbish battery life and is still a bit buggy and slow. The 5310 (I think that's the right one) is lovely, slim, light, cheap and... unavailable. I might be able to find a couple of places that have it on poor contracts but it's meant to be on pay as you go and there seems to be bugger all stock.
There's meant to be a 5800 Comes With Music but I don't believe that's made it to the UK yet. Can't help but feel that Nokia have done the maths on the service and what it would cost them if you could legally get all the music you wanted for a year for the cost of an £80 PAYG handset and decided limiting the numbers would be a good idea.
Is that ad sanctioned by TMobile? Looks pretty magenta to me...
I loved the NGage. it was a great phone in its time. mp3 playback, divx, online browsing, fm radio, tons of apps for the s60. It had it all. Though, MMC and slow usb, and battery life, killed it for me. And it sure could take a licking.
on topic, this service for music moto is not going to fly. I agree about having music and videos on your microsdhc card and that's that. Peace out.
One reason why.
It's lame.
We need good things, like the new Sidekick w/ a good advertising scheme so it wont fail like the others.
T-Mo wonder why the SK never sold well over here, when I had my SK2 and SK3 and got them out to send a text on a bus or something I usually got people my age like "WOW! You can get those in the UK?" why? Because T-Mo UK suck at advertising, apart from the G1.
Anyway. Yeah, UK needs good new phones, not tat like the N95 with like, 5 or 10 free songs which are DRM riddled.
Lol, a sidekick user calling the N95 tat? My word!
We already have plenty of 'good new phones', haven't you noticed that practically every new western phone that is released ends up here...
With such an innovative name like "Comes with music" how could they fail?
Dude!
You are so on the nail with this. Talk about giving it a name that screams after-thought. At least show some degree of creativity and pretend as though it is a core part of your content strategy.
God, I want to love Nokia, but they are doing everything in their power to keep with this friggin' iPhone
Nokia - comes with phone reception.
Common guys - get your shit together!!!!!
Nokia, comes with reception
i loled :-P
They should just be honest about it and make it a £5 bolt-on for all new nokias.
the thing that is bugging me about nokia and their comes with music is that the nokia 5800 is their first touchscreen MUSIC (i repeat MUSIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) phone and yet the "geniuses" have yet to bring the service to the phone.
but theres a picture of it on the ad :-) hahaha
sue them for false advertising
gotta love this shit!
There are "Comes With Music" version of the 5800XM in some countries.
They even used the CWM-style ad design when advertising the 5800, most probably misleading unaware customers that it doesn't actually 'come with music' (well it comes with a few tracks, but not the download service).
If they dropped the stupid handset exclusivity and made it more accessible, even to existing customers, it'd do much better.
As it stands, it's Nokia's own fault that the service is crap.
This was a stupid idea to start with, nokia needs to hire me i would having some firing to do.
They need to really shape it up, they are all over the place. They kill themselves with to many handsets at once, and then lack support for the existing handsets.
The app store is horrible , and i can't imagine OVI will be any better.
They need an apple like app store if they want to compete with apple. Who needs music from nokia? why start a music service, wtf is wrong with them
Drop the DRM, and make an add-on option for existing Nokia phones, and I'm sold.
In Australia the 5800 is ComesWithMusic.
They have pretty good ads too. You see the phone, and then they list all these track names that make up the text of the ad.
E.g.
Hurry
Don't wait
Unlimited
Music
Forever
That sort of thing. If I wasn't waiting for an n97 I'd be all over it.
The Nokia music store is pretty good, if it wasn't about the DRM, I would have bought from it.
And Comes with music sadly isn't available in France...
We got the CWM-style ad campaign for the 5800 in the UK, despite the phone not actually supporting it.
I'd be surprised if some people weren't misled about the availability of the service with the 5800.
It took me a few months to figure out their ads were for songs not a gig with a bunch of cool bands. They were everywhere too.
NGage4Life
"lol"