Nokia Mix Radio (What Happened After Comes With Music)

In the excitement of Nokia’s announcement of its first Windows phones today, one would be forgiven for missing the announcement of Nokia’s first major move in the music space since Comes With Music: Mix Radio. Nokia’s post-Comes With Music strategy was always going to be a difficult one to get right.  Regular readers will know [...]

Music Subscriptions: Dead or Alive?

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] [Posted by Mark Mulligan] Follow me on Real Networks [...]

Putting the Crowd in the Cloud

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] [Posted by Mark Mulligan] Follow me on I have [...]

Five Music Predictions for 2010 (and Five Reasons Why 2009 was a Flop)

[Please note that this post first appeared on the Forrester Consumer Product Strategy blog.  Over the coming month or so I will be migrating all of my activity there.  I will soon be posting new information here for you to amend your feeds and subscriptions. Thanks] Lots happened in 2009 but it wasn’t a vintage [...]

Monkeying Around With Mobile Music (Updated)

Today the triumvirate of Universal Music, UK broadcaster Channel 4 and UK mobile operator Orange announced a Pay As You Go (PAYG) mobile music service called Monkey.  The service is aimed squarely at younger consumers, which matches the demographic of PAYG users and Channel 4’s audience.  The underlying principle of the service is that it [...]

Unlimited Mobile Music Gains Momentum in Singapore

This weekend saw the launch in Singapore of SingTel’s unlimited music download service Amped in partnership with Universal Music.  The service is available with a SingTel data plan, so is very much a data revenue driver for the operator. Although a relatively small market, Singapore is fast becoming the global capital of unlimited mobile music [...]

Comes With Music Finally Gets Its Route To Market

Orange today announced they will be ‘exclusively’ providing Comes With Music on the Nokia 5800 in the UK.  Finally Nokia’s Come With Music gets the route to market it needs. I’ve long been a strong advocate of CWM and that belief remains intact despite reportedly poor sales to date.  Nokia always needed strong channel partner [...]

Spotify: Why It’s Been So Successful and What it Needs to do Next

I first spoke to the guys at Spotify a good few months ago and I have to confess to thinking at the time that they were just another digital music start-up. In fact, it was worse than that, I thought they were potentially another doomed digital music start-up if they didn’t revise their strategy. On [...]

Apple iTunes Music Store (Finally) Goes DRM-free: First Take

So finally Apple gets DRM-free across all of its music catalogue on the iTunes Music Store (80% now, 100% end of Q1). It’s late, not too late but non-the-less late. As Apple accounts for the vast majority of the paid download market we can talk effectively talk about the impact this will have on the [...]

2008: The Year of Free

This time last year I predicted that 2008 would be ‘The Year of Free’. (Targeted legal free that is, not the ‘let’s give it all away and hope for the best’ flavour of free I’ve been posting about here recently.) Though all music can’t ‘just be free’, free services are a crucial element of blended [...]