08 October 2008

Nokia's 'Comes With Music' Service
Will Be Handicapped By DRM!

Few days ago, at the Nokia Remix event held in London, Nokia announced the debut of its pioneering Comes With Music service which offers consumers a new way to discover and enjoy music with premiere planned to start on October 16, 2008 in the United Kingdom exclusively!

Despite Nokia's conditional use of the term "Unlimited" when describing Comes With Music, service apparently contains few surprises that the company does not acknowledge up front and it will be handicapped by DRM!

As promised, the 12 or 18 month subscription authorizes the use of one Comes With Music phone and associated PC. The PC runs the Nokia Music application that enables music to be transferred to and from the phone.

Tracks will be downloadable via Nokia's phones or PCs, and these DRMed tracks will remain playable even after the one-year subscription period finishes as promised and it sounds great but.. . .

Although Comes With Music does indeed allows owners to download as many songs as it is naturally possible in one year, transfer them to a PC and keep them at the end of that time as well but in order to put those songs on a CD you'll need to pay additional fees for every single track.

Of course, thanks to the Microsoft’s 'PlayReady' DRM scheme tracks will not be playable on any other phone or a device like the iPod or Zune. Last but not the least, once when the year is over, you’ll have to buy a new phone to get another 12 months access to the music base.

Sure, most of the functional limitations were expected and I know it is not really a Nokia fault and I firmly believe that it is not right to blame Finish giant because of this but at least they should reduce the usage of the epithets like "lifetime" "unlimited," or "free"!