Inbox:It's a strange world when the company that makes your mobile phone handset and the one that connects you to the network both want to offer you a music download service. That, however, appears to be the new battleground as Nokia last week unveiled a range of new music handsets and a music store to compete with the very mobile networks it sells to.
The story of this "music war" begins with an idea from former Genesis band member Peter Gabriel. In 1999 he helped to found Loudeye to pioneer digital music distribution online. Loudeye was designed to sort out the problems of offering legitimate digital music.
But its plans were set back by Apple which in 2001 created an amazing device which effectively made it possible to carry around illegally (at the time) downloaded MP3 files.
In 2003, Apple launched the iTunes music store which synchronised legitimate music downloads with the iPod, making the whole process consumer friendly. At the start of this year, Apple launched the iPhone in the US, which has continued to send shivers up the spines of the average techno fan.
Finland's Nokia meanwhile has long thought itself as heir to the mobile future and even tried taking this crown with its ill-fated Club Nokia idea in the late 1990s. The mobile networks hated the idea that a mobile handset maker would steal their thunder on providing services and the service was quashed.
Nokia bought Loudeye last year for about $60 million (€44 million) and last week launched its Ovi (Finnish for door) music service (http://ovi.nokia.com), selling music, maps, games and almost certainly videos at some point. It has also signed up Microsoft's video and audio formats, putting it in the opposite camp to Apple.
The new Ovi music service will sell tracks for €1 each, albums at €10 while subscription to stream songs to your PC costs €10 monthly. The prices match those charged by Apple, which commands as much as 80 per cent of the download market. Users of Nokia's new service will be able to download tracks directly to four new Nokia handsets, something the iPhone must be tethered to a computer to do.
The new handsets include the Wi-Fi-enabled N81, which comes with a hefty 8GB of memory to take on the iPhone. The Nokia 5610 XpressMusicis a 3G slider phone, with a host of features such as a 2-megapixel camera.
How the future plays out at this point is anyone's guess, but with both Nokia, Apple and mobile networks fighting over consumers, there's only one winner: you.
