Mobile provider Nokia has announced the launch of the Nokia Music Store in Spain today. Today’s launch in Spain comes several months after Nokia launched in Ireland, Netherlands, Australia, France and Singapore.

To access the music store you need a computer or a Nokia mobile device. On the computer, the service is 10 euros a month for unlimited streaming. On the Nokia handheld devices, songs are 1.50 euros each and albums are priced at 10 euros. The streaming service is DRM-protected.

The desktop application also functions like iTunes in that you can transfer songs from computer to mobile.

Nokia notes regarding the launch, "The catalogue of the Nokia Music Store is focused on the local market, strongly associated with the consumer, as more than 70% of the music that is sold in Spain is local. To achieve this, there is a team in each country to determine more closely the tastes of each region, something completely innovative and distinctive from other digital music stores. Its search engine enables the differentiation between genres such as Flamenco, Latin music, Alternative or Electronic, to name a few." 

Related: Ever wonder how men and women differ on carrying styles for mobiles?

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We initially covered Muxtape back in April and provided a video from founder Justin Ouellette. Muxtape is a MP3 sharing application that allows you to put together playlists and then share them with your friends. Last month Muxtape closed and everyone wondered if the RIAA was behind the closing.

This afternoon Ouellette has posted a lengthy article explaining the background of Muxtape, where the idea came from, the technology, his dealings with the major record labels, the RIAA, Amazon S3 and where Muxtape goes from here. Ouellette notes that they had 100,000 registered users in the first month and over a million unique visitors in that first month.

If you are considering creating any business related to music, you need to read the entire post. Ouellette concludes with the info on the next version of Muxtape:

"Muxtape is relaunching as a service exclusively for bands, offering an extremely powerful platform with unheard-of simplicity for artists to thrive on the internet. Musicians in 2008 without access to a full time web developer have few options when it comes to establishing themselves online, but their needs often revolve around a common set of problems. The new Muxtape will allow bands to upload their own music and offer an embeddable player that works anywhere on the web, in addition to the original muxtape format. Bands will be able to assemble an attractive profile with simple modules that enable optional functionality such as a calendar, photos, comments, downloads and sales, or anything else they need. The system has been built from the ground up to be extended infinitely and is wrapped in a template system that will be open to CSS designers. There will be more details soon. The beta is still private at the moment, but that will change in the coming weeks."

I think a partnership between NY-based Muxtape and NY-based AmieStreet could be a good win for both companies.

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The NYSIA monthly meeting for September consisted of a boot camp for startups. I was able to capture each of the segments on video and this session discussed sales and marketing planning for a new business. Sherri Sklar from Sherri Sklar Strategies presented why you should stay away from marketing blunders, top business mistakes startups make and briefly discussed the elements needed in a sales/marketing plan.

Interesting note: Sklar doesn’t appear to own sherrisklarstrategies and has an overall poor Google result page for terms associated with her name. This is something I would include in any marketing presentation that’s aimed at startups.

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Nick O’Neill is reporting that MySpace has launched a new advertising option within the social network. The advertising option is tied into MySpace Music and is focused on musicians.

Nick notes, "The service also provides targeting by gender, age, location, and specific interest categories. The current categories are Auto, Books, Fashion, Health & Fitness, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Sports, Television, and Video Games. Rather than typing specific keywords, advertisers are forced to select from a pre-defined set of “Genres” within each category."

It looks like MySpace offers a basic ad creation tool to make it easy for non-designers to create an ad. There’s also a live filter which displays the potential impression counts based on the above targeting selections.

After the high rates MySpace charges for their developer gallery, my guess is that the only musicians who will be able to afford this will be those shilling for fast food burgers.

If MySpace allowed external publishers to participate it could be a win-win-win for musicians, MySpace and Web publishers.

The Dallas Morning News is reporting that Best Buy has entered the vending machine game by powering a machine at the Dallas airport. The machines sell all sorts of electronic items from iPod media players to headphones to digital cameras. The only airport I’ve seen these vending machines in so far is Atlanta. But I am sure they will be in all airports soon - the profit margins are just too high not to be everywhere.

My belief is that these machines would sell at an even better percentage if they provided devices that were already charged. And the ability to buy media from the machine (i.e. iTunes) and have it loaded on the device also could be hot. At a minimum these machines should offer charging stations - buy the product, open it and you are given a lockbox to plug in the device and lock it for a period while you wait for your flight.

Back in May we reported on the launch of electronics vending machines at Macy’s stores on the east coast.

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Earlier this week I had the chance to chat with Tunesbag head of marketing Blundstone Osterberger. He describes the service as, "In short, tunesBag is a platform that lets you upload your music and stream it to your flash-enabled browser. You can also upload your playlists or create new ones, recommend tracks to your friends and comment on tracks you like." Tunesbag is currently in private beta.

The interface is very well crafted and you can open music in tabs inside of the app for quick movement. There are playlists as well for making mixtapes. There is a Tunesbag API for 3rd party services to plug in and create their custom apps and widgets. Files are uploaded either via web form or new desktop application. Friends can be pulled from Facebook to build your list.

I asked Osterberger about the issue of legality with this type of app. He replied, "The beauty of the Austrian law is that as a consumer, you are allowed and entitled to make legal copies of copyright-protected material and share it within a "reasonable" amount of people on a non-commercial basis."

Osterberger also shared who he believes are the closest competitors to Tunesbag. They include: anywhere.fm, Simfy, mp3tunes, Deezer, Pandora and last.fm. While last.fm is a competitor, they have also integrated last.fm’s scrobbling feature.

While no mention is made of business model - my guess is an affiliate setup with Amazon/iTunes. The only thing I’ve noticed in my testing is that while the interface is very slick, it’s a bit slow when trying to load a page that has more than 30 songs. They need some sort of loading meter as it seemed a few times like my IE7 crashed when it was just loading. Tunesbag was founded by Hansjoerg Posch in Austria with Osterberger working from London.

If you’d like an invite, we’ve scored 100 of them! Go to this special URL and register — better be quick!

Here’s an example artist page - using Ace of Base:

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PimpMyNews has announced two product updates this morning: more available blogs and a new Twitter integration. PimpMyNews takes a feed and converts it to audio using a computerized voice. The service allows you to grab your favorite blogs and take them with you into iTunes or mp3.

Over 500,000 audio clips are available and the service has expanded to the top 1,000 blogs. PimpMyNews reports that users from over 149 countries have used the service. You can also now create a twitter message with the audio news clips you are currently listening to.

I’d link to the CenterNetworks page but there appears to be no way to do that. An embed would also be nice. Check out our interview with PimpMyNews founder John Atkinson.

Check out the printer we used for our business cards:

Pepsi is announcing a partnership with Amazon for the new Pepsi Stuff campaign. You’ve seen these before - drink 20,000 cans of Pepsi and get a song free. What’s interesting in the announcement is how they push DRM-free music and how great it is to listen to your music from anywhere and on any device.

"Pepsi Stuff gives consumers choices — many choices: from the prizes they select, to the music they want to hear, to the device they want to play it on," said Cie Nicholson, SVP and chief marketing officer, Pepsi-Cola North America. "We are excited to team up with Pepsi and reward millions of Pepsi
Stuff participants with high-quality DRM-free music downloads from major and independent labels, playable on virtually any device, and an easy downloading experience that doesn’t require special software," said Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President for Digital Music and Movies.

Do consumers really care about DRM? I’d suggest no, but it’s good that us techies are opening things up for the normal consumer.

Five "points" will equal a free song but they didn’t share any details on the number of cans for a "point". FYI, this is Pepsi’s largest campaign ever and will launch at the Super Bowl on February 3.

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