The availability of Spotify on Nokia's Ovi app store raises question marks for the future prospects for Nokia's troubled Comes with Music (CwM) service. The ad-funded music service Spotify, a direct competitor to CwM, continues to achieve success, while CwM has struggled to gain operator acceptance and failed to attract a meaningful subscriber base in Europe and elsewhere.
Nokia has attempted to gloss over the availability of Spotify on its Ovi service by stating that it was simply eager to get as many apps as possible on the store. Tellingly, having spent heavily last year, the company has quietly stopped promoting the service and reined in most of its advertising.
Details have never emerged over the nature of the deal Nokia offered to the record labels, causing industry analysts to speculate that it paid too much for access to the music libraries.
Presently, Spotify would seem to be only downloadable to Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices, such as the Nokia E72, and only non-touchscreen handsets are currently being supported.
Separately, a new study from comScore claimed that nearly 24 per cent of mobile users in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain listened to music on their handsets during the first quarter of 2010. The 54 million total mobile music users in these countries represented a 10 per cent increase in the past year.
For more on this story:
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