Hands-on impressions of the Nokia Music Store — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{That pesky DRM} Hands-on impressions of the Nokia Music Store

Nokia also announced 8GB version of its N81 music phone.

3 Sep 2007 at 17:45 GMT Timo Poropudas

Nokia’s music store has been received fairly positively in the media. Here are some comments from Stuart Dredge’s post on August 29, 2007 in Digital Music.

Dredge points out that both the PC and mobile Nokia Music Stores are web-based, not downloadable applications.

Local music is going to be a big deal for the Nokia Music Store - all the executives I spoke to today mentioned this aspect as being important, particularly in Europe. But like iTunes, you’ll still be locked into your country’s local store, due to licensing issues (e.g. Band X might be on Label Y in the UK, but Label Z in France).
The Nokia Music Store website is slick and well designed. Finding your way around is easy, and each song has prominently placed buttons for streaming / downloading / wishlisting / sampling. It doesn’t feel too cluttered.
The notion of ‘tagging’ songs on your phone for download next time you’re at your PC is excellent, and works really well.
I’d like to see more Last.fm style personalisation, given the way Nokia’s execs are shouting about Web 2.0.
Initially, the Nokia Music Store will offer Amazon-style recommendations in a ‘people who liked this also liked...’ way, but there’s no apparent sign of, say, being able to share playlists with friends, or interact in other ways.
The DRM... well, it’s a bit of a disappointment to hear that Nokia isn’t following the likes of iTunes, eMusic and Amazon (well, Amazon hasn’t launched yet, but...) in offering DRM-free tracks from the start. Maybe the record labels are nervous about doing this in a mobile context, what with those pesky kids Bluetoothing stuff to each other.

In his initial verdict Dredge says:

Nokia Music Store might not be selling DRM-free songs, but other stores will be, often as pure MP3 files. So personally, I’d still be minded to buy from those.
The mobile aspects - discovery and tagging - are very slick indeed, and will certainly appeal to anyone who doesn’t mind the DRM aspects to the store.
If nothing else, the first iteration of the Nokia Music Store is a solid entry into the digital music market, with scope for new features to be added in the future.