This evening we had the opportunity to sit down with Adam Mirabella (Global Director of Music Services, Nokia) and discuss Nokia’s foray into services and its Ovi Music service with an Indian twist. In his 4th visit to India in a year, Adam was pretty excited about the opportunities here and Nokia is of course bringing together all the Music industry biggies at Nokia Music Connects 2010.
Nokia has transformed from a devices company to now provide a much more wider range of services to its consumer. The different services come under the ‘Ovi’ brand. This includes Maps, Mail, Apps and now Music. Given that India is a highly diverse economy and the numerous language and religions followed across the nation, Nokia came up against a number of challenges to go digital with music in India. To tackle the same, Nokia has a unique approach to this market with a significant investment in its editorial team who can bring in the regional expertise and make the music offerings relevant to the diverse audience. But the challenges in India doesn’t end there. Piracy brings in the concept of ‘Free’ software in India and that adds its own twist in a market that is suffering in the digital game. Nokia has come up with a unique solution to the problem. Adam informs us that their goal was to get a solution that works for the entire ecosystem, right from the artist / labels to the operators (carriers). And as it seems the Ovi Music Unlimited proved to be a good fit for the market situation. During his talk at Nokia Connects, Adam also revealed that given the unlimited model, users have taken the liberty to try out more than twice as many different genres of music.
Nokia proudly claims that it is already the no 1 revenue driver for digital music (hope we picked that up correctly) but the blogger brigade talking to them was prompt to express their displeasure with many premium devices like the Nokia N97 and the upcoming N8 are left without Ovi Music service. According to Nokia there are some developments and we can expect new services / initiatives to fill in the gap soon. Currently Nokia gives away free music vouchers or Ovi Music Unlimited for selected handsets (they have a collection of 4 million songs, which is pretty good to begin with). A lot of concern was also raised with Nokia pulling or leaving out some of its models without many services that are coming up and the frustration can be best attributed to the fast evolving mobile market.
So will Nokia an iPod of its own? (A dedicated music device?)
– Well it did raise some eyebrows but the answer seems to be a ‘no’. Nothing on cards yet and guess Nokia is happy being a mobile maker for now. However the thought of taking Ovi Music beyond just Nokia (say to other Symbian devices) was not ruled out. Though no such plans immediately. We also quizzed Adam on the upcoming MeeGo Platform and he was confident that Ovi Music would gel pretty well. The UI on MeeGo being better for Ovi Music was mentioned and having seen the N900 (runs Maemo) and the N8 (the latest Symbian powered kingkong from Nokia); we would certainly place our bets on MeeGo!
We also uncovered here that Nokia would take the same approach to promote Ovi Music as it did for their Mail services. If you remember we had come across the in-store push that Nokia had added for their mail service, well there are 4000 Nokia men across India all gearing up to sing Ovi for you.
* our sound recorder gave up and hence the interview was recovered from our notes. Unfortunately we do not have exact quotes made by Adam here. But nevertheless, our analysis is here for you 🙂
Ps: You may also like our interviews with Dr Lars of Google Wave and Dr Ajay Bhatt (co-inventor of USB) 🙂
Ovi is very nice but it is not like iphone’s app store. AppStore is having millions of applications but OVI has very less .