Nokia readies unlimited music downloads

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 4 Dec 2007 at 10:37

Nokia has announced a new music download service called "Comes with Music" that offers an unlimited number of downloads that will continue to work even once a subscription to the service has ended.

Comes with Music (write your own jokes here - Ed) will be launched in the UK in the second quarter of 2008 on a service-specific Nokia handset that include a year's subscription.

Unusually, Comes with Music will allow customers to continue playing their files once the subscription to the service has stopped. How Nokia will stop people amassing a large and cheap digital music collection before abandoning the service is unclear, especially as Nokia claim that the files will be transferable to a user's PC.

"Once the year is complete, customers can keep all their music without having to worry about it disappearing when their subscription is over," says a Nokia statement.

"We set out to create the music experience that people are telling us they are looking for - all the music they want in the form of unlimited downloads to their mobile device and PC," says Anssi Vanjoki, executive general manager of multimedia at Nokia.

"Even if you listened to music 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you would still only scratch the surface of the music that we're making available."

Nokia has been working on mobile music downloads from as early as 2004, when it teamed up with the Loudeye which it later acquired in 2006. Nokia has continued developing the music download service that Loudeye created, but it is unclear whether this is what Come with Music is based on.

Earlier this year, Nokia launched its own, separate music store, to rival Apple's iTunes.

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