Nokia preps Comes with Music reset

Nokia Corp. (NOK) is making plans to reset and rename its all-you-can-eat music service after less than two lackluster years on the scene.
While ambitious, the unlimited music service that was bundled into the price of select Nokia devices has never lived up to its expectations. When the Finnish firm announced Comes with Music to much fanfare in late 2007, the traditionally hardware-driven company was applauded for its new push into services.
Beginning with Universal Music Group and eventually adding all the other major record labels, Comes with Music finally got off the ground nearly a year after it was introduced at Nokia World in 2007.
Like much of Nokia’s business, Comes with Music has been plagued by regional fragmentation. After launching as Comes with Music in various European countries, Nokia started branding new country launches as Ovi Music Unlimited, All About Symbian reports.
Nokia is now planning to move the service under its Ovi services umbrella, according to an e-mail sent to users based in the United Kingdom. The moves makes sense from a marketing perspective since Nokia offers a variety of other services like maps, share, mail, calendar and contacts under the Ovi brand. It also gives Nokia the chance to reboot the service and make another effort to see some return on the significant investment its put into Comes with Music. But Ovi hasn’t exactly been a standout performer for Nokia on the whole either, nor does it have the global name recognition that Nokia would need for any service to achieve mass scale.
Ovi, which translates to “door” in Finnish, is Nokia’s idea of integrating core services with devices. But the most popular cloud-based services today are cross-platform and agnostic to just about everything, including device, carrier and region. Nokia’s Ovi service is essentially anchored to Nokia devices, which limits the company’s ability to penetrate further into countries like the United States where its market share is floundering.