Nokia: Comes With Music deals close

Calling Nokia's forthcoming Comes With Music service "a disruptive model that expands the current music business to a new level," the handset giant's executive vice president of entertainment and communities Tero Ojanpera said Monday that the effort is part of a larger initiative to create an entirely new business for the company. Speaking at the Mobile Entertainment Live! event in Las Vegas, Ojanpera said Comes With Music as well as fledgling Nokia services like the Ovi web platform and the N-Gage gaming effort herald a radical makeover for the Finnish firm: "This is as big a transformation for the company as in 1990, when Nokia was making rubber boots, tires and toilet paper--we saw future was in handsets, and shed our other businesses."

According to Ojanpera, Nokia is making progress in convincing other labels to join Universal Music Group in Comes to Music, which offers consumers a year of unlimited music downloads via Ov-bundled mobile handsets. "We knew we needed a game-changer, because consumers want as easy access to as large a content pool as possible," Ojanpera said. "[Comes With Music] is not about the device or Nokia--it's about great content and how consumers get content." He said the firm is still exploring whether a similar all-you-can-eat approach might apply to other mobile content formats and services.