The unlimited musical download service of the Japanese-Swedish manufacturer might be launched this month. Nokia's unlimited musical service, „Comes With Music”, starts in October, which, as opposed to previous ones, provides free download of an unlimited number of music tracks for a period of one year in case of purchasing some specific phone models. Of course the fifth largest manufacturer and creator of the Walkman musical phones, Sony Ericsson, couldn't just stay looking at this. The Japanese-Swedish company already has agreemements with most large publishers and they hope that they can launch their new music service before the end of September, which will become available in Europe too, before Christmas. Dan Cryan, senior analyst at Screen Digest, says that the decreasing market share of the company makes it necessary to introduce this new download model, even though this has been previously cancelled by the manufacturer, because they have considered that it has negative effect on music. It's evident that the unlimited download could make the Walkman brand more popular and even the network operators won't be able to do anything against it, as most manufacturers will try to make their handsets more attractive in the near future by using similar solutions.
The launch date of the new service depends only the time when the agreements will be signed with the publishers. EMI, Warner Music, Sony BMG and some independent publishers have already signed the contracts, but the largest publisher, Universal Total Music, is still to do it. Sony Ericsson's online store, PlayNow, alteady offers near five million music tracks for download, although those have to be bought one by one at a price of €0.99 EUR per track, but the downloaded tracks are DRM-free. The pricing of the download service from SE will be aligned to the Finnish manufacturer's prices. Tracks downloaded form Nokia's online store can be played back even after the one year period, but due to DRM they can be played only on one computer and a Nokia phone. The devices can be changed but only a couple of times. It is not yet known if Sony Ericsson's unlimited musical service will offer tracks DRM-free or not.
Translated by Szaszati
