Sony Ericsson may after all be the company that has more in place to create a super mobile portal than either Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, and has delivered on time the 5 million music tracks that it promised when it re-launched its PlayNow portal, with real venom, last November.
It says that it has signed 10 record labels including some of the largest, naturally Sony BMG was ready and willing, and to this it has added Warner Music and EMI and the only major that does not seem to be already signed is the biggest of them all in Universal Music. We suspect that the delay on this is just paperwork, and that this doesn’t derive from any desire by Universal not to be part of the show.
Other labels that have signed include The Orchard, IODA, The PocketGroup, Hungama, X5 Music, Bonnier Amigo and VidZone.
Sony Ericsson brought this all together at the Midem music show in Cannes, France this week where it also unveiled the design and web site for PlayNow and introduced an edgy version for the really hip, called launched PlayNow Uncut, which was formerly known as M-Buzz, which had previously run entirely separately from PlayNow, which will feature new, unsigned and developing artists.
The PlayNow arena will launch in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland in May 2008, just to bring the fact home to rival Nokia, and to use the Ericsson brnad influence perhaps, with more European markets to come at the end of Q2 2008 and further expansion in Europe, Americas and Asia during Q3 and Q4. When Sony Ericsson says it will be in 30 markets by the end of 2008, it is talking about entire countries.
When Sony Ericsson originally introduced PlayNow in 2004 it was about listening for free and buying purchase polyphonic ringtones on a handset. Despie the complete lack of column inches written about it compared with iTunes, and given that for most of that time it lived in the shadow of its bigger cousin, the Sony Connect service, now closed, it is impressive that it has already managed 200 million downloads. Now that the service is being orchestrated entirely by Sony Ericsson, as the primary way for Walkman devices to obtain music, that number is sure to increase rapidly.
Sony Ericsson has also added 250 new games to the mobile portal through existing deals with leading games manufactures such as EA Games, Gameloft, THQ, Glu, Digital Chocolate and I-Play and already Sony Ericsson users download more games to their phones than users of any other mobile phone brand. As we said when it re-energized the PlayNow arena in November, how about adding some of the Sony PlayStation class games, or a PlayStation handset, then the sparks would really start to fly.
One of the features of the service has always been TrackID which is now recording 200,000 hits a day, effectively hear a song, let your phone listen to it for a couple of seconds, and then it will identify it and offer it to you to purchase on the system. The purchase can either be made over expensive airways or fro a PC for sideloading later. Sony Ericsson is not unique in having a service like this, but it is unique in being able to buy the track and download it over the air immediately.
The PlayNow arena will feature TrackID Charts, created by consumers in real time using TrackID around the world.
Obviously Sony Ericsson still needs to develop location based services, a global mapping portal that can sit behind lots of other applications, in order to be taken seriously as a contender by Nokia, Microsoft and Google, but if music is a great start, then film might be one of the company’s next dimensions, because that’s another of its group’s natural advantage over the others. Just as easily it could be photos and user generated video, because Sony has the biggest global brand in its Cybershot camera franchise.
Always we have to be clear we are dealing with Sony Ericsson, not Sony, and this is a company that has gone from strength to strength and which has not been mired in the internal turf wars that have sometimes made Sony look like it has lost its will to take firm decisions. In that sense it may get the best of both worlds ‘ access to the incredible technology that Sony has so balefully mismanaged over the past four years, along with the resilient Walkman brand.
Sony Ericsson is becoming the default holder of the Walkman and Cybershot brands which belong to Sony, since the eventual destination of those features is surely on a handset.