The world’s top cellphone maker Nokia and Warner Music Group have put aside their differences to bring the label’s content to Nokia’s Comes With Music initiative as well as Nokia’s Ovi mobile music store.
The Comes With Music offer aims to add the cost of a year’s music subscription into the cost of supported devices, allowing users to download as much music as they like in that time. The music won’t go away at the end of the year, but cannot be transferred to new phones or other devices. Nokia’s Ovi music service differs in that users buy tracks individually, with a copy made available for download to customers’ computers as well.
WMG resisted licensing its music for the Ovi service (which is also the content delivery engine powering the Comes With Music service) due to concerns over other Nokia content initiatives. Specifically, WMG balked at a content sharing feature called MOSH, which allows users to share music and other content.
With this deal, those issues have been resolved, although no details are yet available as to how the two companies came to an agreement. The only major record label yet to join the Comes With Music agreement is EMI Music.
“(Comes With Music) is the first global initiative to fundamentally align the interests of music companies with telecommunications companies,” said Edgar Bronfman, Warner Music Group CEO in a statement announcing the deal.
WMG executive VP of digital strategy and business development Michael Nash told the Financial Times that the deal “is probably the most important deal of its kind that we’ve done so far.” It closely matches the kind of model it hopes to achieve with Internet service providers, in that the price of music is included in the cost of either a device or service subscription.
There’s still no set launch date for when Comes With Music phones will be available, only that it is expected sometime in the second half of the year, and then only in Europe to start. Nokia estimates the service could generate upwards of $4 billion, based on the fact that it sold more than 146 million phones worldwide last year.
