"Comes With Music" sounds like a pretty good deal: Pay a little extra for your Nokia mobile phone, and get unlimited music downloads for a year.
Too bad the service's U.S. launch has been delayed until 2010. Nokia previously said that Comes With Music would launch in 2009, along with its Nokia 5800 XPress Music phone, but those plans are now on hold, Forbes reports.
A Nokia spokeswoman wouldn't explain the delay to Forbes, which pointed out that the news comes as Apple hypes up a music-related event for next week. It seems the article is suggesting indirectly that Nokia is waiting to see what Apple has in store for iTunes and the iPod.
CNet offers another possibility: Perhaps Comes With Music is running into licensing issues, like the ones preventing the ad-supported streaming music service Spotify from coming stateside. In other words, music rights holders could be holding the service back.
Nokia could also be waiting to refine the service before launching it in the United States. Currently, downloaded tracks are restricted to the mobile phone and one registered computer, but Nokia was reportedly considering a switch to DRM-free tracks, given that users immediately figured out how to bypass the copy protection anyway.
I'm doubtful that Nokia would essentially let users download music for any device because it devalues the actual phone, but that's what I'd like to see. In fact, any service that lets you download all the music you want, and then keep it all when the subscription runs out, sounds good to me.
Of course, I can't see record labels embracing such a concept, because they'd immediately assume that rampant piracy or grand-scale downloading of their entire catalogs would follow.
