Sony Ericsson Announces Music Deal & Launches PlayNow Uncut Options

[scotsboyuk]

The glamorous South of France was the setting of Sony Ericsson's unveiling of a deal with ten major record labels, which will add more than 5 million tracks to its catalog. The announcement was made at the MIDEM conference and it also saw Sony Ericsson launch PlayNow Uncut (formerly M-Buzz), which is a place for unsigned up and coming artists to be promoted.



The partnership with the record labels takes in major global players as well as regional labels: Sony BMG, Warner, EMI, The Orchard, IODA, The PocketGroup, Hungama, X5 Music, Bonnier Amigo and VidZone. The deal adds over 5 million tracks to Sony Ericsson's PlayNow Arena. More deals with other regional labels are expected, which will further expand the range of music available from PlayNow Arena as well as allowing Sony Ericsson to better reflect local tastes.



Commenting on the PlayNow Arena service Sony Ericsson Executive Vice President Anders Runevad:



- We are delighted to announce deals with such high calibre record labels. This will help realise our vision for PlayNow™ arena as a service that will be developed in collaboration with our partners. Our commitment is to work with the industry to ensure we are building an experience-based and intuitive content delivery platform, enabling the development of an ecosystem that provides a unique experience for the consumer and a business model where everybody prospers.



The Play Now service also saw the addition of 250 new games and Sony Ericsson claim that their customers download more games to their handsets than users of other devices.



Initially PlayNow Arena will be available in Scandinavia and Finland in May this year whilst further European markets being added at the end of Q2. There will be further markets added throughout the Americas, Asia and Europe going into Q3 and Q4 with SOny Ericsson predicting that the service will be active in around thirty markets by the end of the year.



You can see the service at www.playnow-arena.com.



Sony Ericsson

From the Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog: http://blog.se-nse.net/2008/01/27/sony-eri...-playnow-uncut/.

[Mizzle]

I can't wait for this! :-)

[scotsboyuk]

It's good to see SE giving attention to other areas of their business besides handsets.

[qwerty12]

Probably a bad question but I have to ask ; Who actually uses Play Now?

[Ixalon]

Especially as most the operators seem to brand over PlayNow's main menu icon. It's been around since 2004 and I didn't know the thing existed until I unbranded by first handset

[Mizzle]

I use it once in a while

[Sammyboy]

SE needs to get the manufacturers to stop branding over the Playnow button.... but with other manufacturers having launched their own music services then it would be in their own interests to 'brand over' the playnow button with their own music services.

[scotsboyuk]

It's quite interesting to compare Nokia's music service with SE's because Nokia is putting it on it handsets and not allowing networks to remove it. This hasn't gone down too well with some networks e.g. Orange. On the other side of the coin we have SE, which also puts its music service on its handsets, but allows networks to brand over it. Thus SE may be a bit more 'network friendly'.