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In Malaysia, music comes with Nokia

by Patrick Lee

Tuesday, 02 February 2010 18:25

After many years of wading through the storms of Mininova and Piratebay, the Malaysian music & recording industry has a solution to bringing music to the masses.

Vlasta Berka, GM, Nokia Singapore, Msia & Brunei

Nokia's Comes With Music (CWM) enables its users to access millions of music tracks over the course of a single year. Along with CWM, the company has also launched a flagship smartphone, the Nokia X6; a device that Nokia claims will support up to 35 hours of music playback on 32GB of internal storage.

Nokia X6

Nokia claims it is the first service of its kind in Malaysia; which thus far have not been able to enjoy services like iTunes. Launched on Friday alongside teenybopper band Boys Like Girls, CWM can be accessed on the Nokia X6, N97 Mini and the 5230. But if this makes you think that you can enjoy Comes With Music on your existing N97 Mini or Nokia 5230, think again. In order to enjoy the benefits of Ovi Music, users have to specifically buy a brand new Comes With Music edition of the N97 Mini or a Nokia 5230.

When quizzed on CWM subscription models, Nokia responded that they haven't decided on any at the time, and that users would have to wait for word on this in the future.

According to Sandy Monteiro, President of the Recording Industry of Malaysia (RIM), digital music distribution played a very important role in the music industry, and that it was only in recent years that labels started to take note of it, given that the number of people who listened to music increased.

Comes With Music as seen on the X6

When it came to a question concerning the discovery of local artistes, Ruuben Van Den Heuvel, Head of APAC Nokia, Digital Music Retail, mentioned that local bands would be highlighted on Ovi Music. Ruuben also added that the service would boost the music availability of these bands, even if you were using the service overseas, so long as these local musicians agreed to global distribution. At the same time however, Sandy interjected that it was a band's responsibility when it came to marketing themselves, and not that of CWM.

Downloading music from Ovi Music (X6 view)

When asked if there would be other avenues for digital legal music distribution in Malaysia, Sandy agreed although it would be many more months before a similar approach would take place.

Due to DRM properties, music tracks downloaded from CWM will be in WMA format, and can only be played on both a Nokia device and a PC dedicated to syncing with that particular mobile phone. However, Ruuben mentioned that this was not a permanent feature. Users can switch PCs or phones but only once every three months.

Nokia employees posing with Boys Like Girls