Buy the phone, get the music library for free

From Silicon Alley Insider:

Next month Nokia will launch its "Comes With Music" subscription service in the U.K., ahead of 2009 launches in Europe and Asia. Your new Nokia phone comes with a "free" year's worth of music -- an all-you-can-eat selection of 2.1 million songs, which is about 25% of Apple's iTunes library. After that, you can pay to keep using the service, or cut it off and keep your original song files.

Unanswered questions: How much will the phone cost? Will this come to the US? Will Apple do the same with the iPhone?

Comments

[P. Lee]

Not just the phone cost. Who pays for the bandwidth? Will cost be built-in or does that user have to pay extra for that?

[GB]

I don't know the price of the phone but certainly will not be exorbitant. The point here is that this is the only way of making the music sharing legal again and go into the right path of protecting the intellectual property: Dramatically decrease the price and the hurdles of getting music through the on-line libraries Congratulations to NOKIA for that.

[Business]

How much memory they can support? Cost should not be so high. We want to see it.

[Andreas]

Yes, eight years after MP3.com had millions of free songs available that anyone could download, this becomes the new definition of "free". It hurts an artists heart (and a Nokia owners heart as well), even though it is good news for most consumers.

I wish that someone would remember the hundreds of thousands of artists that have given away their music for ten years now, WITHOUT having to get a mobile to listen to it. I remember downloading gigabytes of great music on MP3.com, some from artists that I still follow - and buy albums from. I remember the days before The Industry closed down Napster, back in the days when it was possible to make a living from giving away your music for free to millions of listeners. That still works, really, but it will not do so for long if the word "free" gets abused like this... :/

[Peter Froberg]

Don't kow if you have already bloged about this, but the Danish telco TDC are bundeling phone and internet subscription with free acces to over 1 million songs.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9388/Danish+ISP+Offers+Customers+Unlimited+FREE+Music+Downloads

[piles]

Nice post, thank you so much for sharing this post.. I really appreciate this.. I recently buy the mobile phone & also i got the music library for free so this is really a true news.. Thanks for posting such a realistic as well as an interesting post here..