Nokia's Comes with Music to launch in both US and Australia this year

Nokia will introduce Comes with Music in the United States later this year, disclosed Tom Erskine, director of global sales in Nokia's Music Division , during the Digital Music Forum in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Comes with Music offers subscribers unlimited downloads of millions of tunes in the Nokia Music Store.

Following rollouts of the service in the UK and Singapore, Nokia officially announced on Wednesday that Comes with Music will launch in Australia on March 20, in conjunction with the world debut of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the company's first mass market touch screen device.

Mobile services such as Comes with Music rang some of the brightest notes in a conference focused on a digital music industry still struggling toward full orchestration.

Participants in a mobile music panel at the Digital Music Forum voiced a lot of optimism about the future of music on smartphones, particularly in that portable devices such as iPhones and Android-based T-Mobile G1s are already showing themselves to be promising platforms for music delivery.

"Sure. It's about the immediacy [and] the ability to have [music] everywhere," responded Matt Schwartz, Verizon Communications' manager of music programming and business development, when asked by a moderator whether music will fare well on Verizon's traditionally voice- and data-centric wireless platform.

Shazam, a music service offered on the Android platform, brings "a whole new buying experience [and] new ways of [accessing] music while on the go," maintained another speaker, Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher. Shazam users can go directly to the Amazon MP3 store to preview and buy music. They can access related videos of the tracks on YouTube, and learn more about musicians by connecting to the artists' Facebook pages.

Also through Shazam, users can identify and tag movies found anywhere -- whether online, on the radio, TV, in a movie or in a store -- and build their own soundtracks from the tagged tunes.