News comes through the wire early this morning that Nokia’s heralded (at least by them) buffet-style music subscription service will be hitting United Kingdom markets next month, thanks to a team up with Carphone Warehouse. Debuts in Asia and the rest of Europe are expected to follow sometime in 2009.
The appeal of the service lies behind its pseudo-free nature. When users purchase a pre-pay 5310 XpressMusic Comes With Music Edition unit, the wide world of Nokia’s unlimited download service will open up, granting access to tunes from Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music, and prospectively EMI, which would bring the total number of songs to roughly 2.1 million prior to launch. Naturally, the 5310 handset costs an estimated £70-£80, so you’re still effectively paying in bulk for your downloads. Nokia just doesn’t want you to see it that way. At the end of the year, the 5310 phone will continue to operate as would be expected, except for the completely un-minor detail of new music downloads no longer being possible – that is, unless you purchase a new Comes With Music edition phone. Anyone imagining a closet full of these things in a few years?
Further details are unknown at the moment, and it seems to be an odd bird of a payment structure to require users to purchase another handset to continue downloading music. We’ll know hard details following Nokia’s press event on October 2nd. Oh, and one other tidbit: Carphone Warehouse is a branch with 800 shops in the UK that also happens to act as Apple’s only independent UK distributor for the iPhone. As mocoNews points out, it’ll be intriguing to see how the two brands are promoted within the same retail space, seeing as Nokia has gone on record as ready and willing to rumble with Apple’s iPhone and the iTunes service.
Source: mocoNews | Engadget Mobile
