Unlimited music for 130 pounds: Nokia

London, Oct 3: In a bid to put an end to music piracy, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, Nokia will soon be launching a new range of phones that shall offer consumers the chance to download and keep any song ever recorded.

And in order to avail this service people are required to buy a 129.99 pounds pay-as-you-go mobile phone, under Nokia's Comes With Music brand. It will give the owner the right to download any song released by almost every important record label onto either the handset or a computer. "You'll be able to download any song you want onto the handset or one personal computer for the first 12 months, and keep all them for ever," Times Online quoted Jo Harlow, a vice-president with Nokia, as saying.

Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music partner the mobile, and now the music industry executives are claiming that they can actually make more profit by encouraging people download as many songs as they want.

That's because Nokia will make a one-off cash payment to the record giants for every phone it sells.

And it is believed that the total money would be much greater than the amount of money that the average music buyer pays for in a year.

Stephen Bryan, the senior vice-president responsible for digital strategy at Warner Music, the record company behind Madonna and REM, said: "This is a model where people move towards paying a subscription for all the music they want. We think it will help attract people away from illegal music and address their music interests in a compelling, legitimate service."

"There will be monitoring to see if people abuse the service. We hope this will help add to the market, because people will still want to buy CDs as a gift or for their collection," said Graeme Ferguson, from Sony BMG, home to Oasis and Dido.

Nokia's Comes With Music, will be available from October 16 in the UK.

It allows unlimited access to songs for a one-year period, but after that time a customer has to buy a new phone.

Any songs downloaded are tied to the particular handset - the first Comes With Music model, the 5310, has 8GB of memory and can store 6,000 songs.

One can also store the songs on one computer, and it is believed that most people will download songs via their home Internet connection, because the cost of downloading a song wirelessly is quite higher.

However, in order to maintain access to the service after the first year, it will be neccesary to buy a new phone.

ANI