Motorola Rocks The House

Motorola this week announced a strategic alliance with the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) which will enable it to push its new range of music-enabled phones through an exclusive content deal.

Under the new agreement, Motorola will become the official sponsor of the ARIA Charts and gain co-naming rights to a range of key ARIA events, including the annual ARIA Awards and the ARIA No.1 Chart Awards.

The newly named ‘Motorola ARIA Charts’ will see printed ARIA charts return to stores, a weekly radio chart show on Nova FM, and a deal to download music content from the MyMoto site.

The new agreement means that Motorola will extend its offering to consumers in the mobile music space. This agreement coincides with some of the latest handsets developed by Motorola. These are:

•  The Motorola ROKR E2 is the update to the original iTunes phone, includes a standard 3.5mm stereo headset jack, up to 2GB of removable memory for storing tracks, and is expected at the end of Q2 2006.
•  The Motorola RAZR V3x is a 3G handset including a 2-megapixel camera, two-way video calling, up to 512 MB of memory, and is available for $850.
• The Motorola RAZR V3i is the iTunes version of the popular RAZR with a 1.23 megapixel digital camera, and is expected during Q2 2006.

This deal will also give Motorola direct access to Australia’s popular music artists, with access to at least 10 Australian artists per year for private promotional performances and guest appearances. This will tie into an “Artist of the Month” promotion through Nova FM. The first of these is the Rogue Traders, who appeared at a launch for the new ARIA charts at the Home nightclub in Sydney on Tuesday.

The new agreement also means that consumers will be able to download a digital version of the Top 40 Chart onto their mobile devices and PDAs, but not musical files.