Here's the scenario. Despite having numerous tracks, bought from the Nokia Music Store in the past 6 months, become unavailable as my memory card has travelled into new handsets (ok, so I'm a little unusual, but even so....), I thought I'd give the Store a last chance.
Simple situation: one handset, working data connection, I'd been reading in a magazine about the classic "Green Onions" and thought I'd grab it on a whim. After all, I still had quite a bit of Nokia Music Store credit to use up...
Step 1: Buy the track
Finding Green Onions was very easy, as was buying and downloading the track. It claimed to have been saved to Music Player on my S60 phone. Very neat so far.
Step 2: Find the track
Yep, looks like the new song has been added to Music Player perfectly.
Step 3: Play the track
Err.... what? How can it be invalid? I only just downloaded it from the Store 30 seconds ago! OK, maybe this is something it can fix by going online and checking my phone's credentials? I'll say yes. 'Unable to acquire license'. Pah.
No go. Time to give up and throw darts at a printout of Nokia Music Store on my office door....
How ridiculous is this? I gave it the simplest possible scenario and, having paid my 80p, I can't listen to the track I bought on this very phone a minute ago. Goodness knows how such a DRM-heavy system copes when real world changes of firmware/memory card/device intervene.
Curiously, the Multimedia panels in my N82 mock me by showing the track and cover art...
Now that Apple's iTunes has thankfully seen sense and followed Amazon and others by going DRM-free, i.e. the tracks you download don't need silly and fragile licenses and can be copied between your phones or computers without annoying error messages, surely it's time for Nokia to follow suit?
Comes with Music is an exception, of course, because of the 'all you can eat' capability, but for regular Nokia Music Store use, I know that I, for one, am not darkening its doors again until it does away with DRM completely.
Rafe rightly points out that Nokia Music Store does work for most people much of the time, but even he admitted that the Nokia Music Store DRM had messed up his phone once (after a firmware update) and he'd had to hard reset it and rebuild just to get DRM working again. And I maintain that this sort of situation shouldn't EVER happen. If there was no ridiculous and unwieldy DRM then there would be nothing to go wrong.
As usual, DRM is only getting in the way of legal and upright citizens, while the pirates of this world just deal in DRM free downloads and never have to worry about it. The whole system is completely cock-eyed.
Steve Litchfield, 9 Feb 2009