Nokia have announced that Comes With Music will make its debut in the UK, through an exclusive deal with The Carphone Warehouse. Available with the the S40 based 5310, the deal is an exclusive for Carphone Warehouse pre-pay customers until Dec 31st 2008. As advertised, the service will allow users to download as much music as they can from the Nokia Music Store for a year. Pre-orders can now be made at www.carphonewarehouse.com.
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Interesting and finally. Interesting (a bit disappointing) that it will first be launched on an old phone.. I think they could easily have capitalized on the hype by putting it out on a completely new phone first..
Interesting to start with a Series 40 device, but it's also potentially a good way of breaking CWM into the mass market as S40 phones tend to be much cheaper than S60. You can currently get a SIM-free 5310 without CWM for about 150 euros plus taxes, so even with the CWM extra charge added to it it should still be a reasonable overall price.
If this works even mildly well for Nokia and any rivals such as Apple, it could well become the default way of selling music very quickly. There are a lot of sceptics about it, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: if customers go for this business model, and it brings in profits for both manufacturers and content producers, then that's all that matters.
What would be interesting is to see if these services could be decoupled from particular brands of hardware. Will we see Nokia's CWM available in combination with non-Nokia handsets for example? As with all these service sales vs hardware sales, it probably depends on which makes more money, the services or the hardware.
An interesting insight into the CWM initiative can be found here:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080902-nokias-comes-with-music-wont-worry-apple-yet.html