According to recent reports, Nokia's Comes With Music service hasn't seen as much traction from the mobile phone users in the UK as one would have expected in the beginning. It seems that only 23,000 British subscribers were attracted by the service since its launch last year, at least this is what Music Ally says.

“If anything I was rather kind in not saying it was a complete catastrophe. It's a big disappointment because very rarely, if ever, have we seen a digital music service that's been so widely promoted in the mainstream media,” said Paul Brindley from Music Ally when making the figures public at an Association of Independent Music conference in London.

Tim Grimsditch, head of product marketing for Nokia Music, also present at the event, stated the following: “We didn't release those numbers so we can't confirm them,” he explained. “It's a very new business model, we're live in five markets and the numbers only mention one. We're going to continue to develop the model and fine tune how we market it.” According to Grimsditch, the Finnish mobile phone maker should have “significant successes” to report from the service in six months' time.

As many of you might already know, consumers who acquire a Nokia Comes With Music phone also receive either 12 or 18 months of unlimited downloads of songs directly on their handset, while the subscription to the service is included in the price of the device. In addition, all songs downloaded through the service can be kept, only that they are protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, meaning that they can not be moved to another device.

The fact that songs come with the DRM protection might actually be the problem for the lack of popularity of Nokia's Comes With Music. “People just want to be able to do what they want to do with the music. Consumers will ask, why can't I put this on my iPod? Obviously, Nokia wants to use this as a way to get people away from using music on their iPods,” he said. “But as a music service in itself, Comes With Music just hasn't hit the mark.”

The service is available in Australia, France, Singapore, Sweden and the UK, and it seems that it has seen the greatest traction from users in Singapore, though Nokia hasn't unveiled any subscriber numbers.