Nokia chooses to unveil music service with DRM

During a recent press event, Nokia announced its "Comes With Music" service, which provides unlimited downloads for subscribers with Nokia music phones, but with DRM.

Nokia's "Comes With Music" will initially give users access to a large catalog of Universal Music recording artists, with more major labels to be added in the future, Nokia says. Subscriptions will be offered to customers upon purchase of a new Nokia device. A deal reported to take place in the second half of 2008 will even offer one year of the service for free.

Subscription download services like Napster present users with the dilemma of having a huge catalog of music at their fingertips, but only for as long as they wish to subscribe. Nokia's service addresses this issue by DRM'ing the downloads with Microsoft's PlaysForSure, so when the subscription expires, the tracks are still available.

While this cures the "shelf life" for subscription-based downloads, it opens a host of other problems associated with DRM.

For example, only about 165 types of portable devices support PlaysForSure, with the main body of support coming from Creative Labs, Samsung, and SanDisk. There is no support for iPod or Zune, and burning will cost the user an additional fee.

Nokia has taken two different methods of protecting music and employed them together, with a result that some might conclude to be less than desirable were it not for the one-year's free trial.