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Music Download Business Gets More Crowded

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Stocks: (RNWK)(NOK)(MOT)(AAPL)(MSFT)(SNDK)

Nokia is talking about starting a music download business. It can now compete with Apple, RealNetworks and Sandisk, Microsoft, and a pack of smaller players like Napster. The huge cell phone company is cutting its forecast for margins next year from 17% to 15%, and it needs to find new sources of revenue to take up the slack.

Nokia is the world’s largest cellphone company, ahead of rivals like Samsung and Motorola. But, it is forecasting that global handset sales growth will drop to 10% next year.

The strength of a possible music download business from Nokia is that it sold 88 million handsets last quarter alone.It has 35% of the global handset market. Apple’s iPod has a total distribution of about 70 million units.

However, Apple’s lock on the music device business is powerful, as rivals like the Microsoft Zune are finding out this holiday season.

Perhaps Nokia want to find another path to growth.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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