"Comes With Music" deal will give customers who buy one of their new music phones 12 months worth of free music downloads.
Nokia said on Tuesday it had signed a deal with Universal Music to offer free 12-month access to Universal artists’ music for buyers of of it’s new music phones as a way to promote cellphones as media devices and to develop new revenue for a music industry struggling with piracy.
So far it has only signed up Universal Music Group International for its new "Comes With Music" offering, but is eyeing similar deals with other labels before the offer starts in the second half of 2008.
"We are in talks with all major labels. The response from labels has been very, very positive," said Nokia spokesman Damian Stathonikos.
Nokia said consumers will be able to keep all the music they have downloaded for free during the 12 month period. Users will be able to download the songs to new Nokia phones or to their computers via mobile or fixed-line broadband connections.
Universal, meanwhile, will get a portion of revenue from sales of each of the new Nokia music phones.
The move signals a shift in Universal Music’s strategy in that it will essentially offer unlimited permanent music downloads for a fixed price or fee, unlike Rhapsody and others where users essentially rent the music.
“It’s one thing to have people downloading free music illegally,” said Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research. “What is bold and strategically important about this is that they are tacitly accepting that they will never get digital youth to pay for music.”
With music fans having grown so accustomed to getting content for free for so long on P2P and file-sharing networks, it may just finally be the case where music is offered at fixed rate rather than per album or song.
So far Nokia hasn’t said how much the new music phones will cost, but if it means a years worth of free tunes it may just be worth the price, though a still reasonable one..
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