Nokia has thrown down the gauntlet to Big Music with a new service that bundles a year's free tunes with the purchase of each new mobile device.
The handset vendor's Comes With Music scheme offers unlimited access to the Universal Music catalog for one year, Nokia said on Tuesday. It said it was in discussions with the other major labels.
The service offers access to millions of tracks for 12 months and allows users to keep their music at the end of the period.
"Even if you listened to music 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you would still only scratch the surface of the music that we're making available," said Nokia executive vice president and head of multimedia, Anssi Vanjoki.
Vanjoki said people were looking for "all the music they want in the form of unlimited downloads to their mobile device and PC."
Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan said in a blog that the offering "puts Nokia exactly where they should be: at the forefront of innovation in the mobile music space."
"Due to their scale and newly acquired aggressive Internet strategy, Nokia are in a unique position to turn the mobile music market on its head," he wrote.