It seems that Nokia has officially pulled the plug on its web and desktop music store that enabled users to download music on their PC. A notice on the site, first noticed by Medianama, says that the Nokia Music site is no longer available and users can still access Nokia Music on their phones. However, this is not new as Nokia has moved to a mobile-only Nokia Music subscription plan and the desktop store had been shut down for new subscribers way back in December 2011.
“We were running the website and desktop client in maintenance mode as per global Nokia Care policy. We had shut down desktop downloads in December 2011 and moved to mobile only subscription plans since then. However, users who had subscriptions before that were still being supported. But with those subscriptions coming to an end, we removed the placeholder site yesterday. Users can still subscribe to and get unlimited online and offline music on their Nokia phones,” a Nokia spokesperson told BGR India.
Nokia Music was launched in 2009 and gave users access to unlimited DRM-free music on select phones for a select period of time depending on the phone. The shutting of the online store, however, is a big loss as it was the only way users could download music in high bitrate files. Nokia only allows download of files in low bitrate on phones in India as it wants to cater to subscribers with GPRS connections as well. The idea is that any song can be downloaded in under a minute irrespective of the data connection available to the subscriber. However, with the shutting down of the desktop client, we hope Nokia offers choice to subscribers to download music in higher quality directly on their phones.
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