Microsoft and Nokia yesterday announced a partnership to take advantage of a growing market for music on mobile phones.
The deal will see Nokia sell phones with Microsoft's Windows Media 10 music player installed. Nokia had long resisted such a move, but were probably swayed last week when Motorola unveiled an iTunes-compatible Motorola phone, the E1060.
One significant fact is that Nokia has no plans to use the rest of the Windows mobile platform on its phones, for fear of going the way of IBM. So why is Windows Media 10 good for Nokia?
Mobile phones that play MP3 or other sound files are not new; many do that already. The latest deals, however, allow Apple and now Microsoft to integrate mobile telephones into their digital rights management (DRM) strategies. This is because Apple's AAC (iTunes) format and Windows Media have DRM components which other audio formats do not. This allows Apple, for example, through its iTunes store, to sell users rights to use a track on their PC, and then control how many devices they transfer it to.
Downloads direct to mobile phones are also becoming increasingly popular, so the moves in effect also give Apple and Microsoft a new distribution channel. A ringtone known as "crazy frog" last month earned over £10m in download fees, and if 3G does ever take off, downloading will be easier and quicker, and presumably more popular.
What this should all be telling you, the user, is that these deals are not really about making it easier for you to download music, listen to music, or share music between your PC and phone. With the right phone and a compatible computer, all these things are relatively easy already.
What the deal is about is making it easier for music distributors to charge you for the privilege, and for anyone involved in that process - handset manufacturers, software companies - to take a cut. (This is not in itself any more pernicious than sleeve designers and retailers taking a cut for making it easy for you to buy CDs, but it is the same sort of principle. Nobody is being altruistic here.)
But perhaps the most intriguing corollary of the two deals is that it further ossifies the world's mass of digital music into two proprietary formats. Already many people use either Apple's AAC format or a rights-managed Windows Media (.wmv) format. As these files are increasingly rights-managed, people will find it difficult to "migrate" their collections between formats.
This means that if, for instance, you have a large library of music files in AAC (iTunes) format, you would be unlikely to want one of the Windows Media Nokia phones. It's early days, but the answer to the following question suggests one scenario that might arise from the deal. Will Nokia owners jettison their handsets to buy a Motorola that works with their record collection, or will people with smallish libraries bite the bullet and fork out to reacquire their files in a format that works on their Nokia?
