Nokia To Offer Free Music Service

This will heat up the mobile music wars even further. According to Macworld, Nokia will launch a new service next year that allows people who buy certain Nokia phones to download music for free for a year after they purchase the device.

The company has signed a worldwide deal with Universal Music to offer the service and is in talks with other major labels, said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s president and CEO, in a speech at the Nokia World conference in Amsterdam on Tuesday.

The service, called Comes with Music, will “allow people to download as many songs as they want during the year after they buy the phone, and then keep the music after the year is up,” Kallasvuo said in the article.

That’s a stunning change from the way subscription music services like Napster and Rhapsody usually work. In those cases, when you stop paying the monthly fee, all the music you downloaded disintegrates. When you consider that this is a mobile music service and not just another online music store, that makes Nokia’s announcement all the more intriguing.

Nokia to launch ‘free’ music download service [Macworld]

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