And a huge hub it is. Nokia is the world’s biggest cellphone company with more than 1.1 billion customers in more than 150 countries, or as Stewart puts it: “the largest distribution network in the history of mankind.” Last year the company sold 472 million handsets, the vast majority of them in India and China. It also dominates the global smart-phone market, though its share is declining in the face of increasing demand for Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, and the new Palm Pre. In the first quarter of 2009, Nokia’s smart-phone market share fell to 41.2 per cent while Apple’s rose to 10.8 per cent.
Becoming the world’s biggest entertainment company requires content. Here Nokia has to play serious catch-up to Apple, which is constantly breaking ground: just last week it launched I Am T-Pain, an app that lets users sing and record with the Grammy-award-winning hip hop artist’s signature sound. Nokia is busy seeking exclusive content for its Ovi Store, the open-platform answer to Apple’s iTunes and App Store. (Talks with Bono to get U2 to release its new album on it didn’t pan out.) The company is working on deals to offer movie and TV downloads as well as on collaborations with Spike Lee and Heroes creator Tim Kring. Stewart has been a key point man, bringing Nokia together with record and studio executives, as well as directors like Baz Luhrmann, and established performers like Jagger, whose daughter Georgia May is dating Stewart’s son Django James. Jagger is part of Stewart’s “stealth” band Super Heavy, a collaboration between Stewart, Jagger, Joss Stone, A. R. Rahman, and Bob Marley’s son Damian, expected to premiere on the Nokia network.
A few years ago, Stewart recommended Nokia pair with British pop star Katy Perry (she credits him with inspiring the artistic breakthrough that led her to write I Kissed a Girl), but the company passed. “So when I sent the thing with Cindy a year later they said ‘Let’s do this,’ ” Stewart says.
The company had been developing a dance game targeted at girls for several years. Gomez provided an opportunity to merge music and gaming platforms. Writing music for the game helped focus her sound, Gomez says. Originally, they’d been thinking “Sade meets Edith Piaf” to show off her classical range and stadium pipes. “But it didn’t have as much rock influence as it does now,” she says. She travelled to Barcelona for dance instruction, then on to Berlin where she donned a motion capture suit that matched the avatar’s movements with her own—a lot of effort for a generic anime character.
Dance Fabulous, which costs $4.99 to download, went live in June in 200 countries; the songs are available on Nokia’s online music store. Nokia won’t give out numbers but Mark Ollila, Nokia’s director of X-Media Solutions, Media & Games, says that response in China has been huge.
Nokia also bankrolled Gomez’s and Stewart’s five-week tour to promote the game; they played small venues in Paris, Toronto, Milan, Helsinki, and Rome. Salas went to see them at Toronto’s Spoke Club: “I was so proud of her,” he says. “To see the years of working and trying so hard and people not responding. If I was the head of Warner in Canada, I would have signed her in five minutes. To see her with a superstar like Dave Stewart, it was like, ‘Right on.’ ”
Stewart has spun out Dance Fabulous into a concept for a feature film he calls “a little Little Miss Sunshine, a little Slumdog Millionaire,” bringing in Slumdog composer Rahman: the story is about a boy in Bombay who finds a Nokia cellphone, starts playing the game and sets out to become a contestant on the dance contest hosted by Gomez’s character. Exactly how Nokia will exploit such explicit product placement is unclear.
Financing is being handled by Hyde Park Entertainment, a Hollywood-based production company. Gomez’s lack of acting experience isn’t a worry, says Hyde Park’s CEO Ashok Amritraj: “She has a terrific look and great voice.”
Stewart is already looking ahead to the next Dance Fabulous iteration: artist-centric platforms to connect with fans. A “Cindy World,” for instance, could offer concert tickets, send messages, provide an acoustic version of a song. That, he hopes, will lead to increased transparency so artists can follow their fan base, measure how many people watched their video or film, receive direct payment and fund projects in development. “It will offer encouragement to so many new artists because there has always been this huge food chain and a nine- to 27-month wait for payment,” he says.
