"Comes With Music" Comes With Delays for U.S.
posted Sunday Sep 6, 2009 by Jon Wurm
Unless you care about Europe for some reason then you are probably not familiar with Nokia's "Comes With Music" service and why it being delayed in the U.S. could make U.S. phone owners a sad panda. Nokia unveiled the service in December 2007 one year before its official launch in the U.K (it's in Europe). Come With Music basically works as a prepaid music service where you pay a certain amount up front and get unlimited downloads from their music library for a whole year. Well that sounds pretty cool but what's the catch? It seems that in order to get European wireless companies to jump on board and foot some of the bill they had to slip some DRM into the mix.
So as it stands your unlimited songs are limited to your phone and one registered computer. Nokia has actually started to consider removing the DRM currently in place as their DRM scheme was undone almost immediately after the service was launched. It seems to me that they didn't really want to mess with DRM in the first place but had to in order to get the support necessary from service providers and DRM has proven to be a bit of a failure in the past and most services like this do not even bother with it anymore.
I think Nokia is onto something here. Let's just hope that the license agreements or whatever is holding back the U.S. debut doesn't keep us from seeing it soon. What are your thoughts on this?
