Nokia Comes with Music needs search help

Rating: Who sang with Carlos on Smooth, again?

Just ahead of he official launch of Comes with Music tomorrow (15^th October), I’m going to argue that Nokia needs some help with its music search engine. Although I like the service overall.

To me, a paid-for music service rises or falls on now easy it is to find the actual song (or track as we used to call them) that you actually want to listen to and/or purchase.

By pure accident, I came across an excellent test for Nokia’s fledgling service. It was a track called Smooth which is officially by Carlos Santana.

What happens when you put that as a search string into Nokia’s online service? Well, the answer is that the results are a total mess. For starters, the service returns a whole bunch of music tracks with the word ’smooth’ in it.

Given that smooth is such a popular word, this doesn’t help. Trying to focus the search on Carlos Santana instead didn’t help. The number of matches was so high it was ridiculous.

The way out was very easy. Go to Google and enter a string which contains the words Santana and smooth; add the word ‘lyrics’ and voila! You instantly discover that Rob Thomas actually sung the vocal line on this particular track.

Go back to Nokia comes with Music. Just add Rob Thomas to the word Smooth and – bang – you find the track you want.

My point? You’ve got to be a bit cleverer than just offer a simple search on artist and track title to sell music online. After all, if you already know the artist and track title, then why wouldn’t it be in your existing music collection?

The ease of use for Nokia’s Comes with Music is very definitely way above that offered by Apple’s iTunes.

It’ simple to transfer tracks from a PC to a Nokia handset using Nokia’s software. It’s just as easy to transfer tracks back from the handset to the PC for backup purposes.

But I just don’t see how this service would inspire Nokia handset owners to download loads of their favourite tracks via a mobile web connexion. Which is probably why the network operators are presently ignoring Comes with Music right now.