Nokia Comes with Music

» see music.nokia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in 2008 i was 24 and finishing computer engineering in ankara. nokia comes with music was the other version of the same mp3 impulse the rest of my class was already feeding off kazaa and limewire residue, except it came bundled with an xpressmusic phone and a one-year drm license. i did not buy in. neither did most people i knew. by 2008 the mp3 collection on my desktop machine had already grown past whatever a 2gb xpressmusic could hold, and the idea of getting that collection re-locked into a phone was an obvious downgrade.

nokia announced the program in december 2007 and launched in the uk on 17 october 2008 as a carphone warehouse exclusive. the first phone was the nokia 5310 xpressmusic at 129.95 pounds. the pitch was that the phone came with a one-year subscription to a 2.1 million track catalog licensed from universal music group, sony bmg, warner music group and several indie distributors including the orchard, ioda, beggars group and the ministry of sound. unlimited downloads inside that year. nothing else like it from a phone maker at the time.

the catch was the drm. nokia used microsoft's windows media drm to lock every download to the specific phone it was downloaded on plus one paired pc. if the phone broke or got replaced the catalog was gone. if you wanted to put your music on a new device you bought it again. the licensing deal nokia had cut with the labels required this. the labels insisted on it. nokia engineered around the requirement instead of fighting it, and the product never recovered from the gap between "unlimited" in the marketing and "locked to this device" in the small print.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the technical shape was familiar to anyone who remembered playsforsure. download tracks via the nokia music store desktop app or the phone client. drm headers wrapped each file. licenses tied to the device id of the original download point. the music played fine for as long as you kept that phone and that pc. it did not play anywhere else, ever, even after your subscription year ended. the subscription year ended at twelve months and then you had what was on the phone and pc, no more downloads.

nokia paired the bundle with phones across the xpressmusic line and later the 5800 xpressmusic touch device. the marketing in the uk leaned into the carphone warehouse retail tier with billboard placement and a christmas push in 2008. the message was the unlimited claim. the small print was the drm. the gap between those two ran the press cycle for the first six months and never closed.

~ the postmortem ~

in late 2010 nokia rebranded comes with music to ovi music unlimited, pulling the offering into the broader ovi services umbrella. the rebrand did not move the numbers. on 17 january 2011 nokia announced that the subscription program would be withdrawn from 27 markets, citing lack of traction. existing subscribers in the discontinued markets kept download access until their personal one-year subscriptions expired and then lost it. the engadget piece quoting the nokia spokesperson named the windows media drm requirement as the major stumbling block.

the six markets that kept the service running were china, india, indonesia, brazil, south africa and turkey. these were the geographies where the unlimited bundle had actually worked, where buyers were willing to take a phone with music attached because the alternative downloads market was less developed. the holdout markets ran the program out through 2014, when the residual licensing wound down and nokia handed the music brand over to what eventually became mixradio.

~ what got buried with it ~

comes with music was the first major-label sanctioned unlimited download service that consumers in europe actually saw on a shelf, two years before spotify went international and four years before unlimited streaming became a normal product category. the drm requirement is the part that aged worst. the catalog deal with the three major labels is the part that aged best, because they later cut versions of the same deal for spotify on cleaner terms once they stopped insisting on the device lock.

the turkey angle is the small footnote. for three more years after the uk and germany lost the service, you could walk into a turkcell or vodafone shop in ankara and buy a nokia phone with the music store still active. by 2014 the residual user base was small enough that nobody noticed when the lights went out. mixradio inherited the brand and the technical infrastructure, then itself died in 2016 under line corporation ownership. the catalog deals had outlived the product that introduced them.

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