How much does Nokia have to pay for content?

WP has never been successful and the majority hate it.  Just wait for Windows 8 and see how fast Microsoft will reverse course with Metro, I mean “Modern UI”.  Sales have hardly moved for WP since it was released.  AT&T spent $450 to $500 per phone in marketing to move the Lumia 900, Nokia was giving them away and still they only managed to “sell” around 300,000.  It was a completer utter failure, a disaster and the consumer spoke loudly but Microsoft still isn’t listening.

Microsoft believes that what you use on a desktop is what you should use on a phone and tablet.  Apple has proved them wrong on the tablet front.  iOS does not have the same interface as OS X does.  So Microsoft is setting themselves up for failure with Windows 8.  Expect SP1 out within a month and the original Windows UI fully restored.

Of course Microsoft will say how many Windows 8 copies they sold, but that is only because it will be cheap out of the gate before they hike the price to what they normally sell it for.  So people will uy it just to have a cheap license and not actually use it.

Not sure that we can define that people hate it but I think the idea is to give it away as a way of attracting new users.  Might be a relatively low cost way of getting people to try a phone.  Not likely a good idea, but at least it is an idea.

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The ability to create your own from "millions" of songs is pretty compelling though. 

“How Nokia will make money on the ad-free service, however, is less clear.”

It is won’t be that bad, they didn’t sell many of the Lumia 900’s at all.  Some of those “sales” were also free due to bugs in the software.  When you are giving something away for free or making it very low cost and still can’t move many of them, you know the consumer hates it.

As someone that checks out a lot of mobile music services I'd have to say that 150 playlists seems lacking.

They do it via volume.  :)

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