Monday, March 23, 2015

Questions about Nokia's new music phone

Questions about Nokia's new music phone
Announced last December, Nokia's Comes With Music initiative has a lot of promise: instead of buying individual songs (like iTunes) or paying a subscription (like Rhapsody, the Zune Pass, and others), the cost of downloading music will be built into the price of the phone. Now, the service supposedly "launched" on Sept. 2 in the U.K., but the Nokia U.K. home page still has a form for users to indicate their interest in the service. No pricing, no details. Meanwhile, press speculation is all over the map. Most folks are assumingit'll come with unlimited downloads. But The Guardian Music Blog has done the math about royalties and concluded that there will be some sort of limit on the number of downloads. (I speculated the same thing back in April.)So here's what Nokia needs to announce tomorrow as they roll out the 5800:How much will the new phone cost? (If it's more than the iPhone, good luck.)How many downloads will a user get, over what period?What will users be able to do with those downloads? Will they be tethered to the phone? (No thanks.) Protected with DRM? (This may be acceptable if the restrictions are reasonable, although this means that downloads will probably not be playable on other devices if you ever give your Nokia phone up in the future.) Will the downloads ever expire and become unplayable? If so, after what period or under what conditions? (This would be a deal-breaker for me--I don't want to redownload every time I buy a new phone--but might be acceptable for users who don't have huge libraries of downloads.)I await the announcement when all will hopefully be revealed....


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