Posted on August 31, 2009 - by Justin Hartman

Nokia and their disruptive model for the music generation

On Thursday Nokia South Africa announced their new Comes with Music range of mobile phones. This new range is not just a series of sexy mobile phones but rather a new, disruptive model to take on the entire music DRM model.

What’s particularly special about Comes with Music is that with every purchase of a new handset (see supported models) you get 12 months of unlimited access to over 5 million songs on the Nokia Music Store. This translates into 5 million songs, for free, for life.

Yes you heard correct! You can download (potentially) all 5 million songs on the Nokia Music Store free of charge for one year. Once your twelve month subscription is over the songs you’ve downloaded are yours to keep for life. (read the press release for more info).

The caveats to this are that the songs are DRM protected and can not be burned to CD and are additionally linked to your PC and mobile handset. You can share music with other Comes with Music users but you will need an additional DRM license to share or copy your music to another device – which will cost you, naturally.

I’m not entirely sure how Nokia plan to really make money off this offering. You can be assured that people will download as many tracks as humanly possible, or as Telkom bandwidth allows, and that will cost them a pretty penny in licensing rights to the artists and record labels. That said, Nokia can be assured that people will continue to buy their mobile devices as a new phone purchase renews the subscription and who’d want to lose their music collection they’ve spent downloading over the last year?

What’s particularly interesting for me is the gauntlet that has now been set to other suppliers of digital music. In particular I wonder how this model will affect iTunes and in turn iPhone sales. I’m busy using the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic device which is very iPhone-like. It has full touch screen support, a 3.2 megapixel camera, records video and comes with 4GB microSD card which can be expanded to 32GB. Granted it’s not as responsive as the iPhone but did I mention free music, for life?

With iTunes music not being available in South Africa the Comes with Music model is sure to dominate this market and potentially hinder Apple’s ability to penetrate the music crowd if/when iTunes comes to SA. In addition, sites like Amazon etc. also don’t support purchasing of music in SA so I think Nokia have the right model at the right time in this market. I honestly expect this range of mobile phones to be a hit as people will buy them just for the music access.