Nokia’s Comes With Music service was rolled out extensively today in the UK (or whatever they call today over there) and the basic premise sounds promising: Pay a little extra for a phone, download all the music you like, and keep it, even when you switch plans. Of course, it’s not as good as it seems.

While the service is initially only available in the UK, Nokia promised the service would hit our shores soon. Perhaps the Finnish mobile-phone company should actually focus on launching in one country at a time, though.

Nokia is facing a setback at the global launch of its music service in the UK later this month because the country’s big four mobile operators are not planning to sell it.

Vodafone, O2 , Orange and T-Mobile are not expecting to use their high street stores to offer Nokia’s handsets featuring its unlimited music download service in the run-up to Christmas….

Two Nokia handsets featuring the service, which offers consumers the ability to download as much music as they want over a 12 or 18 month subscription period, go on sale on October 16 in the UK.

However, Nokia’s long-awaited 5800 mobile, its first touchscreen smartphone, is not one of the two launch models for the service because it will not go on sale in the UK until next year….

It remains unclear how many operators will agree to provide network coverage for the Comes With Music-enabled 5310 and N95 from October 16.

Nokia said: “We are optimistic we will have several operators on board by the end of the year.”

Perhaps retailers and providers are wary of the same thing that consumers should fear: The tracks are in a DRM-shielded WMA format, and can only be played on the phone itself, as well as one PC. (The chosen PC can be changed once a quarter.) Also, there’s apparently an additional charge set for the ability to burn the tracks to disc, which makes sense in a way–burning then ripping is, after all, an easy way to subvert the DRM)–but it sucks in a major way for the consumer. Then again, when has DRM given users reason to worry about their music catalogs?

Of course, you could just go the Reuters route and just report directly from the press release, even if the claims within are nearly totally false.

The world’s top mobile phone maker Nokia said on Thursday it has signed up EMI and many smaller labels to offer their tracks as part of Nokia’s “free” music bundle “Comes with Music.”

I suppose the “bundle” itself is free, although the additional $90 added to the cheapest phone’s price is a little difficult to classify as being without cost. Also, considering there isn’t a carrier attached to the service as of yet, it’s hard to get too psyched–why buy a phone that you can’t actually make calls on?

The lowdown on Comes with Music - not unlimited, comes with DRM [Tech Digest]
Setback for Nokia music service [Financial Times]