The Cloud looks at location based music content

Rating: Even allows unsigned bands to sell their content

Had an interesting discussion with Wi-Fi network operator, The Cloud, last week. It’s taking a very novel angle on location based advertising. The focus is on music in particular.
You might wonder how tenuous a connexion this has with the cellular world until you realise that The Cloud has done a major deal over the Nokia Music Store.The event I attended was designed to promote mycloud which is a new aggregated log-on service for public Wi-Fi services.

But the Cloud’s hot spots have a close connexion with the world of music in that around 5,000 of them are actually located inside either a pub or a club that is associated with live music.

The link is obvious because it would be relatively easy to provide those connecting via the pub/club’s access point with relevant content. After all, it wouldn’t be too difficult to link this content to a band which you know is playing at the time.

The Cloud’s Owen Geddes wouldn’t be drawn on where and how this particular facility would debut but he shrugged off my suggestion that, given The Cloud’s close links to O2, that particular customer might be more than a little upset if it wasn’t included as a launch site.

The logic is compelling. Particularly since the content offered could be provided by a band that doesn’t even have a formal music contract in place but which has published its own material over the internet. Geddes even hinted that adding music-orientated, location based advertising into the mix it might be a possiblity in order to make access to the web via Wi-Fi free at the time of the gig.

That’s not a pipe-dream either because The Cloud has an agreement in place that if you connect to the Nokia Music Store over its ‘Wi-Fi Zone’ paid-for service, you can happily browse and download from the Nokia Store without the time being deducted from your paid-for minutes.

It’s exactly the kind of service I think that the mobile operators should be looking at very seriously. How difficult would it be for Orange to offer something very similar to those at the Glastonbury music festival, for example?

Related News:

1. Sony Ericsson developing geo-tagging location based search for music.
2. Nokia Comes with Music needs search help
3. Nuance Speech Based Mobile Music Content Search
4. Nokia seeks to impress with Music Store demos
5. Mobile music search and discovery: three questions with Victor Fredell Sony Ericsson’s Content Acquisition Manager for music