Forget Spotify – here comes another attempt to make money out of digital music borrowed directly from the shareware world.
Nokia’s Ovi Store has hooked up with mobile music discovery app Shazam to offer a try-before-you-buy version for its handsets running Symbian OS, S60 5.0 and Symbian OS S60 3.1 and 3.2.
These include the new N97, the 5800 XpressMusic, the E71 and the N95 range. A fully featured version of Shazam which integrates with the Nokia Music Store is available for free until 30th November.
After Nokia users spend what’s left of the summer tagging music, sharing tags by SMS, learning more about the tracks, albums and artists, finding what’s hot from the Shazam Tag Chart and buying it from the Nokia Music Store, they’ll have 30 days to decide whether or not to shell out £4 / €5 for the upgrade to keep all features intact. If not, they’ll still be able to use Shazam on a limited feature and tagging basis.
Slight snag: not all Shazam’s additional content and sharing features work on the S60 5.0 devices. But tagging, purchasing and music discovery are all in place.
Shazam has 35 million users worldwide, which they’re predicting will grow to 50 million by the end of the year. At the moment, around 8 percent of those users go from tagging music to buying it.