Despite all the hype around Apple’s iPods, Nokia has sold more music-capable Series 40 and S60 phones. More precisely, while there are around 32 million iPods in use, the number of Nokia Series 40 and S60 devices is 46.5 million. As Nokia expects the total number of such devices to grow to 80 million by year’s end, the theme of developing mobile music applications seems more interesting than ever.
From a developer’s perspective, any music service can be built on the Symbian S60 platform. Also, the S60 platform is based on open specifications and industry standards: Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Digital Rights Management (DRM), Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), and MP3. Mobile-music business models are flexible and include individual downloads, subscriptions, and radio. For example, all Nokia S60 devices support MP3 ring tones, and many also support stereo music and FM radio…
Forum Nokia has a great in-depth guide on the subject.
UPDATE: Forum Nokia released “Music Application Developer’s Guide v1.1” PDF document, provides guidance on using S60 multimedia APIs to create music applications for S60 3rd Edition and future devices.