More digital controversies, and chatter continues about how exactly Nokia's much touted Comes With Music service, due to launch next week, is going to work. There has been much speculation about the Nokia proposition ever since it was first announced, because the basic idea - you can download as much music as you like over a 12 month period, and keep all the tracks at the end of it, and play them forever - seemed too good to be true. With the major record companies on board - currently Universal and SonyBMG - unlikely to be quite that generous, the consensus has been that either Nokia are prepared to take a considerable financial hit on this project in order to secure a place in the digital music market, or there has to be a big catch.
With Nokia denying that it plans to subsidise its download service, techie types have been trying to find the catch - how "permanent" are the downloads you get, and how "unlimited" is the number of tracks you can acquire?
The catch on the former maybe DRM. As previously reported, reports suggest digital rights management technology will be embedded on the free tracks that locks them to Nokia technology and, maybe more than that, to the specific handset and/or PC that the track is downloaded too. This would mean that, while in theory a user has permanent access to tracks they download, in practice once the handset and/or PC become redundant the music is lost.
With regards the latter, there was a very interesting article posted onto the Guardian's website yesterday which alleges that Nokia's definition of unlimited maybe 120. The Guardian say that SonyBMG recently revealed to the Music Managers Forum how the Comes With Music venture will work. It claims that the phone will have a wholesale price of £50, of which £31 will go to the record companies who provide the music. The labels will receive 25.8p per track downloaded, meaning that, unless Nokia are, in fact, planning on subsidising the service, then consumers will be limited to 120 tracks.
However, Nokia maintain that Comes With Music will offer unlimited access to music, and retailers set to sell the new product seem to under the impression that that is the offer also. The Guardian say that when they asked the Nokia press office for clarification they maintain that Comes With Music offers unlimited access to music, though would not specifically state that all the music accessed by handset owners will be free. At the end of the day they apparently promised to return with a full statement on the matter forthwith, and asked the Guardian's article be removed in the meantime.
All of which is very interesting. Comes With Music, it should be noted, is yet to confirm its deal with publishing collecting society MCPS-PRS, without which it won't be able to legally provide any music. How much of the £19 not going to the record companies out of fifty quid wholesale price will have to go to the publishers remains to be seen. Either way, if there is any truth in those figures, even if they only pay the publishers a few pounds per phone, it is hard to see how Nokia could break even on the handset.