Nokia is set to launch Australia’s first subscription music service tomorrow in an effort to use its huge music industry clout to knock Apples’ iTunes platform from the top.
The service however, should see issues as it has been revealed that songs bought from the store will be incompatible with the dominant market leader for portable media players, the Apple iPod.
Price could be another problem if you do not use the subscription plan, as each track will cost $1.70 and albums will sell for $17. However, for $10 a month, Nokia will “allow customers to stream an unlimited number of full-length tracks directly from a player built into its music store website.”
The songs can be downloaded via compatible Nokia phones or on the PC and then synced over. Nokia says the 5310, 5610, 5700, N78, N81, N82, N91, N95, N96 and N76 handsets are all compatible, and other phones will work as long as they support Windows Media Player.
All 2.5 million songs in the catalog will have WMA DRM which will restrict the use and distribution of the songs, going against the current trend of removing DRM from music offerings. The iPod does not support DRM infested WMA files and therefore will not play anything purchased from the store.
Karen Farrugia, Nokia Australia’s music services manager, noted that locking out iPod owners would limit potential target market but the company still hopes to topple iTunes.
“At this time we are launching Windows Media DRM-protected files and we will look in the future to introduce an MP3 service … we’re in discussions with labels to really work on that,” she said.
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Result for: itunes
Although Steve Jobs has said official internal Blu-ray drives will not be heading to Macs anytime soon, Other World Computing (OWC) has announced the launch of its Mercury Pro Blu-ray external Blu-ray burner which features a quad interface that will allow it to connect to Macs.
The OWC can connect via USB 2.0, FireWire 400, Firewire 800, or eSATA to Macs or PCs and will write BD-R or BD-RE, single layer and dual layer at 4x.
The drive can also notably burn HD DVDs, DVDs and CDs and will work with a myriad of software including Apple iTunes, Apple iDVD 5, Apple Disc Burner, Apple DVD Studio Pro, NTI DragonBurn, Roxio Toast, Roxio Easy Media Creator, and Nero.
The drive is set to ship later this month for $499.99 USD alone or $579.99 USD with Roxio Toast 9 Titanium for Mac OS X.
Result for: itunes
If the indie music collective group Merlin has its way, then smaller music labels could be getting better deals for their content on iTunes and other legal online music stores in the near future.
The group has recently opened up signups and now has 12,000 labels supporting its cause for better conditions for their artists.
The labels under Merlin hope to “both speed up negotiations for licensing and posting music at online stores as well as to secure better deals.” The group feels that a larger representative will most “likely secure better royalty terms and use rights than by themselves.”
According to the report, deals are in the making with “existing music services” including the not-yet opened MySpace Music and the market leader iTunes.
