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Nokia is poised to release its new “Comes With Music” phones on October 17th in Britain.  The phones will come with a subscription music service that will allow users to keep any song they obtain through it for 12 months.  The service will come with every phone, with nothing mentioned about payment.  So far, three major studios have signed on for the project: Universal, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group.  Seems like a fairly good push to start with.

According to the Reuters reports, the music companies are hoping this will diminish the popularity of Apple’s iTunes Music Store.  I don’t see why, but music publishers don’t seem to really like Apple too much lately.  Maybe they don’t like making slightly less money?  iTunes is the biggest music seller out there at the moment (well, in America at least, not too sure about worldwide), but this Nokia subscription plan may take a bit away from that.  If the iPhone and other lower-end phones have shown anything, it’s that people don’t mind listening to music on cellphones.

There are a few problems with the service that can be a bit off a turn-off.  According to a Wired post, the tracks will have to be downloaded via PC (nothing about whether it is Mac or Linux compatible), and cannot be downloaded over the air.  On top of that, the tracks use PlaysForSure DRM, the DRM so bad even its creator left it.  Seems a bit outdated thanks to the iTunes over-the-air downloads available on the iPhone.  There is no talk of bit rate yet, but I assume it can’t be that great if the songs are being given in a subscription service.  Perhaps it would be easier to just stick with buying songs from iTunes Plus and Amazon MP3 store, than putting them on a music phone of any kind.

As of yet, there is not an American release date for the Nokia “Comes With Music” phones.

Read [Reuters]

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