Warner Music joins Nokia's 'Comes With Music' scheme

After giving its back catalogue to 7digital for DRM-free MP3 downloads, Warner Music has become the third of the four major worldwide record labels to join Nokia's Comes With Music service. It joins Universal and Sony BMG in Nokia's 'unlimited free music for all' club, leaving just EMI outside playing with its toys in the rain.

Both new and classic artists will be included, though it's not known at this time how quickly new releases will be made available to Comes With Music or how extensive the 'free' Warner catalogue will be.

For those not familiar, Comes With Music is a DRM'd mobile music download service to be made available on a range of Nokia-only handsets in the second half of this year. For 12 months, consumers will be able to download and keep as much music as they want.

The catch? Well, apart from the DRM, you'll need to buy a new phone after the year's up if you want to keep using the service. Although you can transfer tracks for playback on a PC, you can't burn them to a CD unless you cough up some cash per track and you can't add them to an iPod.

Other than that, details are sketchy -- no one's entirely sure what small print will come with the Comes With Music service, how much the handsets will cost or even what handsets will be available.

But whatever the final deal, having three out of four major labels on board is good for the service. It's just a shame the undoubtedly heavily compressed, DRM'd, 'free' music will mostly be played through crappy bundled earphones with a complete disregard to audio finesse on the downloader's part. But hey, if it's 'free', who gives a damn? Well, us.

But as far as music discovery is concerned, it's certainly no bad thing. -Nate Lanxon