Loading ...Sony Ericsson Announces Music Deal & Launches PlayNow Uncut
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.
Filed under: Announcement, Conference, Entertainment, Music, News
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Is this SE’s answer to the “N-gage” and “Nokia Music Store”?
I’m not sure it’s so much an ‘answer’ to Nokia’s Music Store as it is Sony Ericsson looking to expand and establish their own presence in the music market. I don’t see it as being necessarily a reaction to Nokia as much as a natural progression for Sony Ericsson 9as for Nokia).
[...] Via USEB [...]