With the Loudeye acquisition sewn up, the next question is: Where does Nokia music strategy go from here? Clues are scattered everywhere, beginning with the sharp focus on music services across the Nseries of devices and ending with the recommender service that harnesses human input, rather than algorithms, to introduce users to the music they’re most likely to appreciate. I caught up with David Williams, director of Nokia’s music services, to find out more about the specific elements that will – and will not – be a part of Nokia’s strategy going forward. The audio of the interview is here.

To be clear, the Loudeye acquisition lays the groundwork for an ambitious and holistic music consumptions service. As Williams put it: “The plans here are ... to bring to the Nokia consumer the music experiences from a complete perspective, the product and the experiences outside that which would include delivering the devices, applications and the ability to purchase music from online and over the air and various channels.” It’s a package that could be a pure D2C play or a destination on an operator portal – depending on the geography and the bigger-picture business rules a mobile operator, or services provider, has chosen as its modus operandi. “In the Asian market, for instance, the approach there is different to the approach in European markets.  I think it’s a wait and see as to how we’re going to move in this area, but we’ll be working with operators on bringing, and assisting them to bring, their solutions to the market.” The final word on music services: “We are at the beginning of this approach and we plan on launching some experiences during next year that will allow consumers to listen to music and purchase music through their Nokia devices.  The details on that we can announce a bit closer to the time.”

High-tech/High-touch: Predictably, Williams couldn’t divulge much, but he did say we could take some cues from recent activities and announcements. Chief among these is recommenders, and creating connections between users and their peers around content. “It’s all about bringing you music in genres you would never have heard of before, and therefore ... you wouldn’t be able to search for something you didn’t know about….  An algorithm couldn’t recommend you something completely out of the blue because it has to work within statistic recommendation space, and knowing what you might like based on what you’ve heard.”

Shop Till You Drop: In William’s view, the device should be the entry-point to the user’s preferred music store and overall music experience. It’s all about on-device capacity. “So whether you want to search via artist, create playlists, or search by genre (and) also then connect to your selected music service -whether that be the operator’s (portal) or third party services – it’s all available from a touch of a button within the Nokia music product range currently.” He continued: “We’re working with operators all the time on their music services today, and ...the fact that we’re not going down let’s say a closed proprietary path here - in terms of formats or DRM- (creates) the option for the consumer to use their Nokia product as their music player of choice, and access their store of choice via that device, or at least have products that they’ve bought from the store of choice playable on that device.”

Message to the content makers: It’s up to the developers and the media community to take the tools available and run with them to create entirely new and fresh content. Because Nokia devices are natively programmable, they “enable different communities ...to bring content to the same consumers ... but through a different channel (and) in a different way, in different formats and in different forms. Whether (that will be) shorter programming or smaller media types – who knows?....The fact that this is an open platform means that everybody can play the game, and bring the experiences they want to bring to their consumers, in a way that makes sense to them.”
The audio of the interview is here.