Hands-on with the Australian Nokia Music Store's subscription service

Adam Turner
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 19:00

Opinion and Analysis

Annoyingly IE6 crashed on me a few times during the few hours I played with the streaming service, on what is generally a reliable computer. It never happened mid-song, only when I was editing the playlists, and the streams sounded clean so I think if you created a long playlist and then left it alone it would be okay. A few searches also came up with errors, but these could also just be teething issues.

I also installed the Nokia Media Bar on Vista without a hitch and for a minute or so I had the service happily running on both computers simulateously. Once the XP machine got to the end of the next song, it refused to play anymore tracks until I pressed stopped on the Vista machine. It just said "there was a problem playing this stream", but obviously the problem was that I was using two machines at once.

While the Nokia Music Store isn't perfect, you'll be prepared to overlook its flaws when you re-discover all those albums you haven't listened to for years - stuff you owned as a kid on tapes or LPs that have been lost in the sands of time. You can also dip into music you otherwise wouldn't listen to. The feeling of freedom a subscription music service gives you is quite amazing.

I've got absolutely no interest in buying music downloads from the Nokia Music Store or anyone else. I'm a Mac user and I won't even buy music from the iTunes Store. I prefer to buy CDs and rip them in the bit-rate and format of my choice and then tuck away the disc as a backup.

The beauty of a streaming music subscription service is there's no DRM to deal with (apart from the stupid Windows-only clause), no format lock-in and no long term commitment. It makes the concept of "owning" music irrelevant and thus the concept of "stealing" music irrelevant as well. It's easy and faster to find music on the Nokia Music Store than on BitTorrent and the music lives in the cloud so it's always there when you need it.

If the iTunes Store or someone else does it better tomorrow, there's nothing stopping me cancelling my subscription and walking away. Meanwhile, for a mere $10 a month I can rediscover my misspent bogan youth on the Nokia Music Store.