Qualms with music

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Oct 07 2008, 22:22 IST

It is a gift that keeps on giving—for a year, at least. Starting in Britain this month, buyers of some handsets made by Nokia will be able to download as much digital music as they like. The handsets, starting with a model costing £130 ($230), are bundled with a year’s free online-music subscription, called “Comes With Music” (CWM), launched on October 2nd. You can download music, and listen to it, on both the handset and your PC. Once the subscription expires at the end of the year, you can still listen to the tracks.

Nokia’s new handsets are sure to appear under many Christmas trees this year. The offer of unlim-ited downloads will appeal to teenagers; and parents will not have to worry about their children getting caught downloading music illegally, or spending a fortune at online music-stores. But CWM and similar subscription services are also being touted as a potentially life-saving gift to the ailing music industry.

That is because they cleverly reconcile the demands of teenagers, who think music should be free, with those of record companies, which want to make money.

The world’s biggest handset-maker has pulled this off by acting as a go-between: it licenses music from the four major labels and some independent record firms at a discount, tags some of the cost onto the device’s purchasing price and absorbs the rest itself. Such a deal is made possible by a convergence of interests. Sales of digital music are growing, but not fast enough to offset falling

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