Comes With Music not coming to U.S. in 2009

According to a report in Forbes, phone giant Nokia has delayed the U.S. launch of its Comes With Music service until 2010.

Nokia first announced Comes With Music back in December 2007, then revealed more details almost a year later as the service launched in the U.K. Under the plan, cell phone buyers pay some extra money up front and, in exchange, get the right to download as many songs as they want from Nokia's music store for one year. Those downloads don't expire when the user's cell phone contract ends, but they are copy-protected, limiting usage to the phone and one computer that's registered with the service. Still, it seemed like a reasonable deal if Nokia could convince cellular carriers to subsidize some of the cost, and early reviews from the U.K. were mostly positive. I even suggested that Microsoft follow Nokia's lead whenever it launches its next-generation consumer-focused smartphones.

I thought the launch of the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music phone in the U.S. would be accompanied by the launch of the service in the U.S. as well, but it wasn't. So what's the problem? My guess is that Nokia's facing the same licensing economics that are limiting free download service Spotify to the European market only. Nokia may also be waiting for a more fundamental transition: the company has said that it's considering removing digital rights management limits from future iterations of the service, allowing the downloads to be played and shared between an unlimited number of devices. (In fact, the Comes With Music DRM scheme was bypassed almost immediately, proving for the umpteenth time that the concept is flawed.) It's only a matter of time: three years ago, nobody envisioned the content owners abandoning DRM on single-song downloads. Now, there's not a per-song download service that still uses it.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

[gsmiller88]

Do American's buy Nokia phones anymore?

[streamOG]

Matti,

FYI the reason digital download services stopped using DRM is not because it's ineffective at preventing piracy. They stopped using DRM because Apple doesn't license their DRM technology and therefore none of the music services could compete with Apple on the iPod. This is widely known in the Music industry and I was kind of caught off guard that you weren't aware of it.

By the way, the RIO was like the 5th MP3 Player to be developed. Had you reviewed the MPMan F10 from Saehan Information Systems through Eiger Labs, then you would have truly been a historian and pioneer in the space. Michael Robertson gave my partner and I one of these back in 1998. Cool stuff.

Regards,

Christopher Levy
[e-mail]

[MattRosoff]

Ah, memory...you actually made me go back and look up the printout of that story (CNET blasted a bunch of old content from their servers in 2001 or so, so I lost all my online clips from the days when I was a full-time employee here). The piece was published on the last day of 1998, was actually entitled "MP3 Shoot-out" and featured the Rio PMP 300 vs...Saehan's MPMan F-10! So yeah, I was on it, although probably not as quickly as you. An earlier piece I wrote in November related my failed efforts to get Saehan to send me a device...apparently it took about a month.

As far as DRM goes, your facts about Apple refusing to license FairPlay are correct. Once the labels realized that Jobs had them over the ropes, they agreed to license DRM-free files to third party sites like Amazon...only to have Apple follow suit, rendering the whole question moot. But software based DRM was never technically bulletproof. I think hardware-based encryption like the TPM was the only reasonable answer for content protection, but too expensive, too late, and against users' interests--I'm going to buy a new computer that lets me do less than the last one?--which is why it only makes sense for users to protect their own data against intruders (e.g., Bitlocker).