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Nokia Launches Music Service With Concerts and Sundance Channel Film Series

Green Day performed in New York at an event September 15 to launch the Nokia Music service in the United States.
Green Day performed in New York at an event September 15 to launch the Nokia Music service in the United States.
Photo: Courtesy of Nokia

Nokia is creating live music events and a documentary film series to both promote and improve its new mobile music streaming service. The events kicked off this fall in five cities, coinciding with the debut of Nokia Music in the United States. The company is now developing more events for 2013.

“The face-to-face event is very interactive. You can get feedback from the fans and artists and get a good dialogue going,” said Jyrki Rosenberg, global head of Nokia Entertainment. “We have global and local teams of music specialists that curate the music channels. For them to be able to keep them fresh—we update them every week—they need constant input of where the music tastes of American consumers is going. So this dialogue is invaluable.”

The events kicked off September 15 in New York with a concert at Irving Plaza by Green Day, a band that Rosenberg said “really resonates with a big audience.” Nokia Music is a free service exclusive to the company’s Lumia handsets, and the concert was done in partnership with AT&T, which is a provider of the devices. Both companies promoted the event through social media channels, and the band also generated publicity. Rosenberg estimates the combined reach from all three properties was 144 million people.

To create extended buzz, Nokia developed additional promotions for customers who purchased a Lumia device from AT&T: they received access to a special playlist on Nokia Music curated by Green Day, and they also received access to the band’s new album one week before the general public.

The launch campaign continued in October and November with events in Atlanta, Nashville, Miami, and Los Angeles. In that city, Nokia hosted a luncheon where guests screened rough cuts of its new documentary series about the music scene in six cities. The documentaries will begin airing on the Sundance Channel in January.

“The idea is that through those films and interviews we are learning about up-and-coming artists and new American music,” Rosenberg said. "The music taste and scene in New Orleans is very different than Detroit or New York or Los Angeles. That’s why we wanted to have a good representation of the whole country. All these inputs go to the Nokia Music service itself and the channels based on these locations."

Viewers will be able to follow each director’s journey across the country on nokia-music.com, which will provide behind-the-scenes content such as director’s blogs, pictures from the road, and video diaries. Rosenberg said Nokia will develop more music events for 2013 but declined to share any details.

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