Nokia and Sony Ericsson threaten cellular carriers with their new music plans.
By Mark Halper
NEW YORK (Fortune Magazine) -- Mobile operators are losing their grip on the mobile-music business. The latest threats: a planned free service from handset vendor Nokia and a new music-downloading service from rival Sony Ericsson that will launch next spring.
Sony Ericsson plans to offer more than one million full-track songs that users can download straight to their phones or PCs with a service called PlayNow. It's a gutsy move, because PlayNow undermines Sony Ericsson's best customers, mobile carriers like Orange and Vodafone that buy hundreds of millions of phones.
In the traditional cellular business, it's the carriers, not the handset vendors, that sell services like music. Just two months earlier, the announcement by Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, that it was launching its own music service triggered a flap with Orange. The operator refused to stock offending Nokia phones that included links to the music site.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/12/24/102025792/?postversion=2007121418
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