Nokia Music Shop launches tomorrow

[slitchfield]

Last night Nokia UK held a small press event in London where we were told that Nokia's UK Music Shop, first shown off at the Go Play event in August, would launch on Thursday morning (November 1st). The final pricing will be revealed tomorrow but the indications are of pricing at around 80p per track £8 per album. Read on for more details.

Read on in the full article.

[viipottaja]

Good stuff! Yeah, one can beach and moan about DRM all one wants, but the reality of the business is what it is and Nokia cannot single handedly change that. Can't wait to see it here in the US! It the selection is good and it works well, it will give Apple a good run for its money. Also, could not agree with you more on the point that the carriers refusing to carry N81 are behind their times.. business models are a changing and they better catch up.

Seems the music industry are just giving more power to the "legal" services in Russia etc, trying to charge £8 for an album? It's often cheaper to get the album shipped from a Channel Island retailer on CD complete with nice artistic cover etc, and rip it yourself. No pain in the butt DRM rubbish to deal with. No restriction on players etc.


The whole reason why 90% of people I know won't touch iTunes is because it's poor value for money and inconvenient. Drop DRM, it's like locking a door on a house with no walls, just plain stupid.

And £8 for an album? I haven't stopped laughing yet.

Unlimited streaming? Now that's all well and good but I want to be able to fill my mobile for that cost. If they did that they'd have an interesting service. As it is it's in a sort of halfway house between iTunes and Napster with no clear advantages.

[viipottaja]

Unregistered: "drop DRM". Sure, as you wish. Do you REALLY think they would not drop if they could? That's essentially a music industry decision, not a Nokia decision.

As for the price of an album 1) prices will OF COURSE vary depending on the market 2) a typical new release/best seller CD on UK Amazon costs UKP8.98. So 8 quid is about right.

Already online (see link in press release), agree 8.00 too expensive (a CD not too much more these days), with reduced packing, shipping, sales floor rent these downloads (at lower quality) should sit around the 5.00 mark...More profit for record company and assume the actual artist gets the same! Also using wma limits its appeal, use a more open standard and higher bit rate for my support...

[zestuart]

Actually it's up and running now, and it's pretty nice as browser-based experiences go.

Now it just needs to a) get to Firefox and b) get to my bally e90!!!!! *growl*

(Oh and maybe drop the DRM... But every techie knows they're way around it, right?)

[Williamoni]

Yep, eight quid is only about right for a new album. Go to play.com and get hundreds of albums for a fiver each, maybe thousands. And there's no messing around with DRM.

Far better to buy the actual CD and then rip it yourself.

zestuart: (Oh and maybe drop the DRM... But every techie knows they're way around it, right?)

zestuart, no need to be a techie, in fact it's not even necessary to have a mac to spoonfeed how to do it, my grandmother does it using a 2002 laptop on legalsounds

DRM is just so silly it's unbelievable.

[soybomb]

Just checked the site...

Supported platform: XP or Vista only
Supported browser: IE 6 and higher only
Supported players: DRM-enabled WMP only

Oh, not just the music, but the site as well -- I can't see anything but an unsupported-browser message. I'm sorry, is this 1996? Did we learn *nothing* about digital downloads (or for that matter, web accessibility) in the last 8 years?

They should be 50p top per song. I would rather buy the cd and put the songs on my phone myself and still be able to listen to good quality sound on my hifi. Or download mp3's for free lol.