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?
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?
Posted by: P. Lee | September 03, 2008 at 12:50 PM
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.
Posted by: GB | September 03, 2008 at 02:24 PM
How much memory they can support? Cost should not be so high. We want to see it.
Posted by: Business | September 03, 2008 at 09:28 PM
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... :/
Posted by: Andreas | September 05, 2008 at 08:07 PM
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
Posted by: Peter Froberg | September 08, 2008 at 09:52 AM