EMI's Latin America division has announced a new deal with phone manufacturer Nokia which will see Nokia 6230 mobiles sold in the region coming pre-loaded with music from the major label's catalogue, including global names like Coldplay and KT Tunstall as well as artists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Chile.
The music will be provided on a 128MB memory card. Each card will come with four full tracks, two from international artists and two from local artists. There will also be ring tones, wallpapers and a number of video clips installed, including a live video performance of 'Other Side of the World' by KT Tunstall, and a short interview with Coldplay.
Confirming the deal, EMI Latin America boss Marco Bissi told reporters: "This is a great agreement with Nokia which responds to EMI's goal to make our music available, whenever and wherever music fans want to experience it. We're very excited to be working with Nokia to deliver great music from EMI artists to the increasingly-connected music fans in the Latin market."
Nokia Latin America Senior VP Maurizio Angelone added: "Nokia is very pleased with this collaboration with EMI because of their great repertoire of international and local music in addition to their alignment with our vision of providing mobile entertainment and increased personalisation to our end users. Nokia connects people to their passions - in this case music - and as the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, Nokia is taking the lead to make mobile music widely accessible, as a natural extension of our Connecting People slogan".
It is not entirely clear what the long term objectives of the memory card promotion are. Consumers will get a booklet promoting featured artists, with incentives to buy more of their music on CD. Meanwhile the promotion will presumably demonstrate the multi-media potential of the handsets. However, it is not known if either party sees there being a future in selling such memory card collections for consumption on a mobile, or whether the promotion is more about positioning the mobile as a digital music player to be principally fed by a mobile or web based download platform.