Free 200 Music Tracks from Nokia Music Store India

Technorati Tags: Music,Free,Mobiles

Few days back I noticed that Nokia Music Store, India has started festival season offer.       You can download 200 free music tracks from Nokia Music store-India. I checked this on     OVI Player application on my laptop and found that they tracks are classified into 4 categories.  Bollywood, South, Devotional, More(Non Film music, Other).

In Bollywood section I found some really nice tracks both oldies and new. I liked this collection , especially tracks from 90s of Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan.

You can download and enjoy these tracks in 2 ways.

1) Via your Nokia Mobile – If you have got latest Nokia mobile , you can find Music Store option under Music Menu in your phone. You can launch it and register and navigate to 200 Free tracks link. Many Older S60 , S40 phones do not have Music store.

2) Via your PC – This will be better option for many as normally we have faster broadband connections at home than downloading over slow EDGE/GPRS on Mobile. You will need to have OVI Player installed on your PC. Mac/Linux users have to wait until Nokia releases this app for them. You can get OVI Player for PC from http://music.nokia.co.in/UnsupportedPC/home.aspx

Even though site still mentions “Nokia Music”, It has already got renamed to “OVI Player”.  I guess Nokia staff has really got confused with this rebranding business :)

Also even if these “free” tracks wont cost you anything, they are DRMed tracks.Which means you won’t be able to transfer them freely. If you transfer it to different PC, when you try to play that track , license will be checked for that track by connecting to Nokia Music. You will be required to enter your Nokia Music ID/Password. Thus license will be transferred. Also Note that you have limited Burn rights, in this case 10.

Rights may differ from track to track , hence it’s better to check. You can just right click track and see Properties.

One good thing is that you you can keep these tracks as long as you want, means it’s not time bound service like few other Music store services are. You can also  see and re-download all tracks by going to My Account –> Purchased Music. Same thing you can do via Music Store client on your mobile phone.

Nokia is really trying to push it’s Music service in India. This is 2nd time they have offered free tracks for festival season. They had Free 100 tracks offer during Diwali. Also they keep running contests/free gift offers on select movie/album tracks which also cool.

They have really good collection, Best I have seen in Indian context. I could find many Marathi tracks which I never thought I would see. Even many Hindi oldies are present.

I can see 3 negative points in current setup of Nokia Music store in India.

1) They really do not have any mechanism to sell music , apart from vouchers which you get with select Nokia handsets. I think they need to quickly add other payment channels like Operator billing(which is very popular for content like caller tunes, ringtones) and direct purchase via credit/debit cards. I always wonder why Nokia follow different routes for payment channels of their services. For Maps licenses they have really good payment mechanism via direct credit card billing, even for N-Gage , they had credit card as well as voucher billing. Overall I feel they are limiting their service by not giving choice to customers. One more point to remember here is Pricing, They have to get it right(read “low”) to make Music store success.

2) Searching for tracks is pathetic.  This seems to be same story as searching in OVI store.     It is just not reliable. I was trying to look for tracks of movie “Paa” but when I entered it in Title/Album field, I got lot of results. That too not presented well. I think  search Function in every Nokia service is huge failure. OVI Store, OVI Maps, OVI Music same story.

3) Sometimes license management doesn’t work very well between phone and PC. Thus I find some Tracks I can play on mobile but when I try to play on PC, I get message “You do not have the playback rights to this track”. It just makes user experience bad.

I think Nokia Music has great potential in India but they will need to address these issues. But their service looks best especially since it doesn’t have any capable competition as of now,Hungama.com has started their service but they do not have extensive collection as Nokia. Also their service is subscription based, i.e you need to have valid active service to even listen to tracks which you may have downloaded earlier. Virgin Mobile has also launched handset with Free  Music download service. I do not have any details about it.

I hope many of you must have tried and used Nokia Music on mobile as well as PC. Let me know your experience via comments.