Nokia prepares pan-European music with 1m Tubes under its belt

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Nokia prepares pan-European music with 1m Tubes under its belt

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 27 January, 2009

READ MORE: Nokia | Europe

Despite sceptical stories about Nokia's early impact on the mobile music market, the company is claiming success for its flagship XpressMusic 5800 handset, the new vehicle for its Comes With Music unlimited download service, which had clocked up a million sales by its launch day in the UK last Friday. Now the Finnish company is set to extend the intergrated device/music offering around Europe before mid-year, having signed a pan-European licensing deal with major record labels Universal, EMI and Sony.

Australia and Singapore are already lined up to get Comes with Music and the 5800 touchscreen (aka Tube) this quarter, and deals Nokia has signed with national collection societies point to its next European markets, after the Q4 launch in the UK. These are with the organizations for France, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

The 5800 is currently available online and at Nokia's Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 and London Regent Street stores, and will roll out to operators and other outlets over the coming weeks. The device is selling for £249, but subsidized versions should follow via deals with all the major cellcos (rumors that Vodafone had a three-month exclusive turned out not to be true). On January 30 the 5800 will be offered by Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, O2, T-Mobile UK, Orange, Phones4u and Virgin Mobile.

It's hard to know just where Nokia has sold a million of these devices. The Tube has been on sale, but without its Comes with Music service attached, only since November, and then only in Russia, Spain, India, and parts of Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. The UK launch is the critical one, because Nokia needs to see if it can get across a rivalry with the iPhone. Recently, there was talk of a slowdown in older XpressMusic handsets with CWM, because of anticipation of the 5800's arrival and seasonal post-holiday price cutting by Carphone Warehouse.

Nokia shipped 468m handsets in 2008 so the 5800 represents about 0.2% of its total shipments. It usually ships around 140m devices which can carry and play music each year. A likely expectation within Nokia for this phone would be in excess of 20m units during its first year, but of course it has to launch the Nokia Music Store in each country first - so far this is live in 12 countries (Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden UK and UAE), and the CWM unlimited deal only in the UK.