Nokia Kool Aid: Delicious.

Nokia held one of their typically dazzling press launches on Tuesday at the 66^th street Armory. The main thrust was for the N95, another impressive step forward in the move toward Total Convergence. This little baby has incredibly juicy multi-connectivity,  and a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and 30 frames/second video. The really cool element, however, was built-in GPS and a “World Map” with the potential for all sorts of open-platform applications that could be added on. I have to say, I’ve totally drunk the Kool Aid on the Nokia brand. Their consistent innovations always feel truly user-orientened, and I have this sense of the entire nation of Finland working as a hive of ideas and creativity, pushing the limits of technology’s human applications further and further. Plus they put on really, really good press events.

But the big news from my perspective was a new music service they’re launching in the next couple of months called ‘Music Recommenders’. They’ve gotten David Bowie to sign on to oversee/guide/promote the service, and the event featured Bowie chatting about MR in a short film made by Wim Wenders that was shot in his typical multi-continent style. They’ve scouted out and recruited 40 of the coolest independent record shops around the world, and principals from those shops will be posting their monthly picks for the choicest new stuff from their genre of expertise on the Music Recommenders site. In the next few months downloads of the tracks will become available, first in the U.K, then in Australia, then everywhere. The track listings and the DJ’s notes will be available shortly though, and while you could get similar information by combing through twenty different magazines and sites this is a marvelously eclectic and meticulously chosen kind of music curating. It’s sort of the anti-iTunes, driving you away from the center of the commercial music superhighway and back onto the dusty, funky roads where the sounds are fresh and the artists who may never chart onto the top 40 are superstars. I talked to DJs/record store dudes from Philly, Atlanta and London who were on hand to spin and explain, and their sincere enthusiasm was evident and their chops legit. The electricity that comes from sharing amazing music got me psyched to use the site when it’s up and running. I looked at a beta version and it’s simple, effective and to the point. As an avid music listener who’s become a little paralyzed by the bland digital marketplace this stands to re-invent my online sonic experience. The address is musicrecommenders.com; you can read a bit more about it there and check out the impressively pan-global array of stores in the mix. Don’t worry, I’ll be reminding you about it when it’s fully functional.