Nokia Comes With Music sales not shattering the Earth

By Nate Lanxon on 05 January 2009, 12:23pm

Sales of Nokia's Comes With Music service have been "Okay, but not Earth-shattering," according to a report in the Financial Times. The comment came from someone familiar with the financial details of Comes With Music, who declined to be named in the FT's report.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, consumers find music freely available on the Internet to be a far more attractive option than paying for Nokia's premium service. Not only that, but the fact that the largest mobile network operators in the UK refuse to sell it (most offer their own competing services) means fewer teens are being shown Comes With Music, or being offered a compelling reason to invest at all.

We see various other issues, too, one of which is that Comes With Music isn't available on all Nokia's handsets. In fact, it's currently sold with just two of Nokia's products -- the 5310 and the N95 8GB. And what's more, when you're offering unlimited downloads, the few meagre gigabytes of storage on these phones just isn't enough.

Our mobile phones editor Andrew Lim thinks the service has been poorly marketed, too -- few people seem to have even heard about the service, he claims, lending more weight to our belief that the lack of network deals has harmed Nokia's chances of making Comes With Music a popular talking point, if not a popular seller.

But this could all change in 2009. Maybe. More handsets will 'Come With Music' -- such as the hotly anticipated touchscreen 5800 XpressMusic and, we assume, the flagship new N97. And with a broader range of price plans for these handsets and their service contracts, Comes With Music might tempt enough people to ignore the fact that it also comes with DRM and incompatibility with iPods and Walkmans. Oh, did we not mention that?