NOKIA’S global head for music Liz Schimel hit the nail right on the head.
In a recent phone interview with The Straits Times, she said that the best way to reduce Internet piracy was to "offer desirable legal alternatives".
Desirable though, means different things to different people.
At a guess though, desirable for Singaporeans is cheap and hassle-free, since respect for intellectual property doesn’t appear to have quite taken root here despite our Government’s best efforts.
And while the Government can take action against end-users for Internet piracy, let’s just say that this is unlikely to go down well with Singaporeans, considering about one quarter of Net users here regularly download music and movies.
So, “desirable legal alternatives”.
Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which will be launched on Saturday, falls short on a few fronts *cough* copy-protection, limited to Nokia handsets *cough*.
But it is a tremendous leap from what was available just a few years ago. Then, the only legit music was pay-per-track, copy-protected, platform - Apple or Microsoft, pick only one - specific services.
Today, there are many more services, and existing ones have become much more consumer-friendly.
Per-track services like Apple’s iTunes – which by the way, is still not officially available here, five years after its April 2003 American launch, and despite it being available in New Zealand which has a similar population size to Singapore – have become cheaper and some songs are no longer copy-protected.
Other services like music subscription service Rhapsody are also available in some markets – just not here, unfortunately - and while local services like SoundBuzz exist, they have seen limited success.
Nokia’s Comes With Music is a move in the right direction.
The download-all-you-want model is a huge draw in the local context. You also have to give Nokia props for not holding the consumer hostage to continuing to pay user charges if he no longer wishes to continue after the first year, yet is still able to enjoy previous downloads.
In fact, I’ll stick my neck out and say, this is a great model for the Singapore market.
Unfortunately, the service won’t work for the non-Nokia user who is willing to pay for legit music to listen on his computer, car stereo, or MP3 player.
And this is where most of the world enjoy their digital music.
In other words, a decade after Napster, pirated music still reigns supreme compared to legit offerings, not to mention, “free”.
For many Net users, who have long since figured out that there is no real penalty for end-user piracy, this is where the rubber hits the road.
If the music industry is serious about wanting more consumers to go legit, they need to stop complaining about piracy’s impact on them and how it is illegal – I’m sorry, Net users know, they just don’t care – and come up with a Comes With Music – for all devices.
Such a service may well be the only way to make inroads into the entrenched pro-piracy Internet culture, and more importantly, to make money.
This time next year I will probably be reporting how 30, 40, 80 per cent of Singapore Net users are downloading music.
The only unanswered question will be whether it is pirated or legit music.
Read more about Nokia's new music service for mobile phones.