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Nokia the Next to Try an iTunes Killer?
fragmentate writes "Nokia recently acquired Loudeye Corp., a digital media distribution channel, presumably to offer streaming media to providers and their customers. BusinessWeek is speculating, 'the company may be seeking to go after none other than the 800-pound gorilla of the digital music world, Apple Computer. [...] Yet the Loudeye brand is virtually unknown when compared with that of Apple's hugely popular iTunes service. This gives carriers the chance to market their own brand instead, says P.J. McNealy, an analyst with American Technology Research.'"
"Killers" rarely work. Name me one that did work.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
The Nokia N91 has been one of the most highly anticipated music phones. It was one of the phones touted to be an iPod killer, as it has a 4GB hard drive similar to the now defunct iPod Mini. After being delayed for some time now, the N91 is finally here, and Mobile Burn managed to get hold of one for a test drive. The Nokia N91 runs on Symbian OS v9.1 and, like the previously reviewed N71, it also features the much improved 3rd edition of the S60 user interface.
Probably because the US cell phone market is so byzantine compared to the rest of the world.
Every time I go to Asia, I am reminded of just how fast the rest of the world is moving away from computers and towards phones. When you have your email, games, videos and music on your phone, justifying a computer purchase becomes harder and harder.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Simply quoting the article
Nokia has already tried to enter the music area
Nokia also tried to become a content provider, only to be rejected by the carriers:
So they will enter the music distribution area, but not competing with the carriers. Instead they will use Loudeye to compete with iTMS, making you download the music to your computer and then to your phone?
And why? To sell more phones?
But 100% of the 22.5 million iPod buyers bought it to listen to music. Most of the Nokia buyers bought it to make phone calls.
I'm not sure what Nokia is doing with Loudeye, but believing that they intend to attack Apple + iTMS directly instead of doing something with wireless music distribution seems pretty far fetched.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
After the smashing success of the NGage, Nokia couldn't help but go after the one manufacturer that owns its market more than Nintendo owns portable game systems. I see nothing but success in their future, and -- god willing -- the triumphant return of sidetalkin'.
Game... blouses.
Ah yes. There is Napster! For what reason might we, the enlightened internetweb people, need to pay 99 cents a song?
And then Apple sold umpty trillion $ worth of 99 cent songs.
And now everyone runs to copy them.
Just further proof that:
skeptics.
are.
ALWAYS.
wrong.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I find it interesting how every competitor to iTunes simply sets up a music store and expects the consumers to start flooding in. If they paid more attention, they might get a feeling for what Apple is actually up to. (And why they're constantly ahead of the competition.)
Has anyone here seen the pilot episode of the new Aquaman series that didn't get picked up? If you did, then you probably watched it off of iTunes. If you similarly saw the Global Frequency pilot, then you may have found that the experience of getting Aquaman off of iTunes compared favorably with getting Global Frequency off of a P2P network. The only difference is that you didn't have any TV execs telling you how horrible a person you are for "stealing" the material off a P2P network rather than... erm... not watching it because it wasn't available via any other outlet.
In fact, the pilot for the new Aquaman series feels very much like a the network testing the waters to gauge viewer response. Since they weren't going to produce a series anyway (it got canned in the WB/UPN merger) it made perfect cannon-fodder for this sort of experiment. Now we'll see if the execs pick up on the fan enthusiasm and produce the show.
Or will we?
What I think goes right past many analysts is that (IMHO) it's also Apple's experiment. Just how many viewers can they get from Internet purchases alone? Is it enough to run a series only on the net? Perhaps enough to partner with a television network as SciFi and SkyOne did with BSG? Or perhaps the results will be just enough to suggest that advertiser-supported Internet television will be the wave of the future? Either way, this is a huge experiment for Apple and content creators alike. Slowly but surely, Apple is ushering in an era of content distributed ONLY via the Internet, thus phasing out the old methods of distribution.
If Apple's experiments are successful, they will instantly make other iTunes clones obsolete. Not only would they need to be content carriers, but they'd need to be content producers (or at least exclusive distribution points) as well! I don't think anyone else is ready for that leap quite yet. Apple may have come from behind in regards to Internet music, but they will probably be the first in show with Internet television.
Sorry Nokia. You're already too late.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
When I can buy the music I want at a reasonable price with zero DRM (nada, none, zip... not Apple's kinda-friendly-with-the-masses DRM... none) and uncompressed formats, then I'm in... and I will buy a lot of music that way. There's a few places I buy from now, but the selections are limited.
But until then, it's physical CD's for me and all of the overhead that goes along with that. If stupid record companies want less profit because they're moving around physical media, then fine... that's their problem.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
It'll never happen as long as they insist upon charging people for every little thing they do to their phones. I love my iPod nano, and I have never bought anything from iTMS. I don't even have an iTMS account. While much of my stuff is (gasp!) downloads (mostly stuff from Japan that I can NOT get in an American music store), a lot of was ripped from my own CDs.
The purpose of iTMS is to sell iPods, not the other way around.
Just look at what's on your own MP3 player and imagine a greedy cell phone company making you pay them for the privilege of putting them there.
Note that I rarely use a cell phone anyhow, and the phone I do have is seconded to my mom's cell (since she's the one who wanted me to have a cell phone in the first place), so if I'm wrong in my perception of cell phone companies, then I'm wrong. But what I've been hearing about cell phone companies makes me think I'm pretty close to the mark.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I am always amused at how overdone "*insert company name here* to try an *insert market dominating / news headline catching product here* killer" headlines (and similar) are. Especially when it comes to things like Google, MySpace, or iTunes. First of all, how can one new produt or website possibly come out to actually "kill" one of these brands? Don't sell by the headline, sell by the content. The real killers are lawsuits.
I gotta have more cowbell.
That's because a product has to be VERY well established for someone to talk about it being killed. Sure, AltaVista may have been fairly well established, but nowhere near as well established as iTunes is now in terms of market share and whatnot (also, searching the internet was just a New Thing back then). Marketing something as a killer really is sort of a doomed system, because labelling something a killer admits that the opposition product is already very well established and in domination of the market. So yes, the Super-Parent is half-right when he says that killers don't often succeed: when they're labeled as killers, they're going up against absurd odds, whereas products that aren't developed to be killers are often killers because they break into the market that isn't as well established. That's what I think, anyway.
As for coming up with "Killer" products, VHS was sort of a BetaMax killer, to present a famous example.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
I remember when OD2 was 3 guys in a bedroom, and I was one of them.
:)
The main failure I see in OD2's business model was that it ran a "white label" system. It powered the music stores for brands that didn't give a shit about music. Packard-Bell is a great example. They barely give a shit about building computers, but they know even less about music. Wanadoo (now Orange) was (is?) one of the biggest customers, but again - what does an ISP care about music? Nothing. So none of these partners really cared about their music portals or did anything with them. They just let them rot away.
MSN is the biggest customer in terms of users, but they never really cared enough to do anything useful - and they showed just how much they cared when they started installing big Flash ads all over their site. The ad revenue probably brought them more than the music ever did.
Apple made the right decision by building a single brand. Of course, this requires some serious marketing outlay which white-labelling doesn't (your partners spend the marketing beans), but in the end produces a much richer experience IMO.
Why does Coca-Cola need it's own music store? It's a trick question - they don't. Coca-Cola had their own store built around OD2's platform, but now they've abandoned it and just have a page inside iTunes. THAT is a better combination of brands.
OD2 Loudeye also pissed their money away buying OverPeer. I kept asking the Korean tech guys - "How will you keep getting more IPs as your servers get blocked?" "Ah, it's our secret" they said. I never did find out their "secret" for all the good it did them. Never start a war against the hardcore pirates on the Internet. They're cleverer than you. And plus, they're 12 years old and have far too much disposable time to fuck you up.
Am I surprised Nokia bought OD2? A bit. I worked on the N91 project with Nokia a couple of years ago, back in the days when they were pissing themselves with fear over a Apple/Moto iPhone which still hasn't *really* arrived. The idea of Nokia phone which does music is fairly sound - the main idea of course is that you cut out the PC element. You buy and download the songs straight to your phone (and you can sync them back to your desktop too if you want). The spanner in the works, as Apple found to their detriment, is the networks. Apple tried to do it without the networks and they demanded their cut. They want a chunk of every track sold. The problem is, Apple (like all the other music stores with fixed pricing) only makes a couple of cents on most tracks - there is no room for a cut for the networks. And the networks need to pay for all that bandwidth you'll use downloading your songs.
What have Nokia actually bought? 5 pieces of paper. The contracts with all the record labels (majors + indies). I wouldn't be surprised if that was all they really wanted from the deal. It saves them a whole bunch of work in negotiating contracts and paying royalty advances.
Do I think Nokia will succeed? Maybe. I've been inside the belly of the beast though. Nokia have gone seriously downhill in recent years. The quality control on their software is shoddy. Their desktop software has always been horrendous. A lot of their software design is outsourced. Internally their organisational structure seems to be dragging them down. I really don't hold out much hope.
My money is on Apple. They have everything, end-to-end. If they really are building their own phone from scratch with their own UI then they'll end up winning this game. The only thing they lack compared to Nokia is the relationships with the mobile networks, but money can solve that problem - as Apple have hinted previously about setting up their own virtual network.
Caveat: I'm a OD2 Loudeye shareholder. My shares are barely worth the paper they're written on
I don't think you understand why the iPod sells so well. Nobody is comparing the iPod features with its competitors and buying an iPod because it is more features for less money. If average people comparison shopped for music players, the iPod would be dead already.
I want something small, something that works, and something that I enjoy using (ie has exceptional industrial design). The iPod wins here. Why is Apple the only major consumer electronics company that seems to give a crap about good design? Beauty is subjective, but it would be hard to argue that Apple has failed with their product designs.
I definitely don't want a music player bundled with my phone (I have yet to see a phone that I consider well designed- the Moto Pebl, or whatever it's called, comes close). I do not want moving parts and definitely not something the size of a frickin' cd or dvd.
I currently have about a 10 GB audio collection and maybe 2-5% is music that I have copied from somewhere else. A big chunk of it is audio books and pod casts. Don't assume that all anybody uses their iPod for is music. If I could, I would probably have videos as well