This morning Nokia announced that their Music Store is now available in Ireland, bringing the total country count up to 4, worldwide. The Nokia Music Store is integrated into the newest Nseries handsets such as the N95 8GB and N81 8GB, and offers the ability to purchase and download music directly on the handset over WiFi or 3G networks.
The store offers over 2.5 million tracks, priced at EUR 1, with albums running EUR 10 (though I don’t understand why people still purchase digital music in ‘albums’, but that’s another post altogether). The addition of Ireland to the launch countries is a step forward as Nokia (hopefully) intends to cover the planet with their online music store.
The Nokia Music Store is also available on your desktop computer, though sadly it requires Internet Explorer to function (you can use IE Tab in Firefox if you want). The store uses Windows PlaysForSure DRM and allows you to transfer tracks between a set number of devices before you need to repurchase it.
Nokia has also shown off a desktop client, dubbed the Nokia Desktop Music Manager, but it made a sneaky appearance at the Go Play event last August, and hasn’t shown up since, so it might have unfortunately been scrapped.
