I meant to post to this earlier. Helienne Lindvall has some interesting news on Nokia’s Comes With Music. In her Blog at the Guardian she points out that CWM might eventually be a rather limited proposition to both, users and rights holders. It seems like Nokia has yet to reach a license agreement with UK rights societey MCPS-PRS before CWM’s launch date on October, 2nd.
“MCPS-PRS, the organisation that represents and collects royalties for the composers, hasn’t yet come to an agreement with Nokia regarding how much the writers will be paid. When I asked MCPS-PRS about it I was told: “The deal will be done for launch!” Hopefully, it will be more advantageous for the composers than the YouTube deal they struck, which so far seems to be bringing in the pennies.”
Even more alarming: Nokia will either have to limit the number of actual songs their users will download via CWM or they will have to eat the costs for all downloads exceeding the per gadget amount they pay the labels.
“These are the details of the Nokia Comes With Music scheme – as they have been given to the MMF by Sony BMG: the handset will have a “wholesale” price of £50, of which £31 will be attributable to sound recordings (this does not include the songwriters’ payments, which the MCPS-PRS is currently negotiating). Therefore, the consumer will not be able to download an unlimited number of free tracks as first touted, rather a maximum of 120 in a year. This is because the lowest price per download that the labels agreed on would be 25.8p.”
