Nokia has announced an upgrade of their free monthly music service, Nokia Music, for their Windows-based Lumia phones. The Finnish smartphone maker is calling this new premium service, Nokia Music+, and it offers upgraded features including unlimited skips, unlimited downloads and better sound quality of music streams.
Lumia owners can take advantage of the new advanced features of Nokia Music+ for a modest monthly fee of just $3.99. The free version of the Pandora-like service already offers users customizable radio stations and playlists of music mixes called Mix Radio.
"It's the only smartphone music service out there offering access to millions of songs out of the box without the need to sign up, sign in, or suffer adverts in between enjoying the music. When you add in the ability to skip songs and save playlists for offline uses like the tube, you have something unique." said Jyrki Rosenberg, Vice President of Entertainment at Nokia.
Nokia 's 2012 end of year sales figures pertaining to the Lumia handsets may offer some indication to where Nokia Music stands among similar music streaming services. Nokia has sold over 14.3 million Lumia devices to date and saw an increase in Lumia sales from 2.9 million in Q3 to 4.4 million in Q4 for the year of 2012. Although the actual data for number of Lumia owners who use Nokia Music has not been released, Rosenberg says, "If we talk activation rates - how many people who bought a Lumia activate the service - that number is very big. The great majority of users activate it." Popular streaming music service, Pandora reports 67.1 million active users for 2012.
The introduction of Nokia Music+ may help to boost Nokia Lumia sales for 2013, as the music service has some impressive new features. Additional features of the app include lyric streaming for songs and a web component that will allow users to listen to Mix Radio on their PC, Smart TV or tablet. The app upgrade is expected to be available in 24 countries within the first quarter of 2013 and is currently exclusively available for Nokia Lumia phones.
