Comes With Music is Nokia’s fantastic all-you-can-eat music service that allows subscribers to download as much music as they like for free.
You can play it on your Nokia phone as well as your laptop. With that in mind, we’ve started to see how quickly the entire family can get to grips with the service and build the world's biggest music collection – see how we're getting on....
It would be easy to set yourself the challenge of building a Comes With Music library for yourself, there are over six million tracks to choose from after all. However, the real value is in opening the service to the whole family. We've set Comes With Music up on the house netbook (a Samsung NC10 wirelessly linked to Logitech speakers) so we can all share the music.
The lady of the house, or her in-doors, had a great start with A, so can she keep up the pace with B? A quick look at her CD collection pulls up Blur, Blondie and Buffalo Tom as three prime choices. Blur get an instant win with their entire back catalogue – that'll keep her singing until the re-union gigs this summer.
Everyone has a favourite Blondie track but can you name an album other than Parellel Lines? No, neither can we so we go for the The Platinum Collection, making that 2 – 0 to Comes With Music. Trying for a curve-ball with Buffalo Tom, Comes With Music throws up the entire back catalogue but not last year's re-union album. Satisfied with her haul and 3 – 0 win to Comes With Music, it's time for the youngest member of the family to try and stump CWM!
My daughter is 12 and loves all things Disney and Nick!, so we hit our stride straight away with Beyonce, grabbing B'Day (Deluxe Version) and even the new I Am Sasha Fierce before moving on the Black Eyed Peas. Bit disappointed not to find a Greatest Hits, so we grab Elephunk and Monkey Business before calling it a day.
Teenage Boy likes rock, so he's chosen a classic in the form of Black Sabbath, before moving onto something a little fresher in the form of Blink 182 and Bullet for My Valentine. Blink 182 is well served with pretty much everything they've done, so that's an easy win. Then again, Bullet for My Valentine only throws up two albums, Scream Aim Fire and The Poison, so the experience isn't that great for the boy.
Black Sabbath also proves a little thin on the ground, with only three early albums – Paranoid, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage on offer, along with The Dio Years, which gets a thumbs up from me and a groan from the boy! A quick look at iTunes shows a better selection but with prices starting at over £6 each, we're happy with what we have on Comes With Music, thanks.
A quick check of my CD collection shows 31 bands and artists under B, but I'm going to choose three quite different acts – The Beastie Boys, Billy Bragg and Beirut. I've got all the Beastie Boys on CD but with the 20th Anniversary of Paul's Boutique it's a great chance to get the remastered version, so that's on the download list, along with The Mix Up Bonus Tracks.
Billy Bragg has been quite outspoken of late, first about MySpace and more recently about MTV, so we were interested to see how much of his back catalogue would be on offer. Surprisingly, everything he did for Cooking Vinyl records is on there, so Victim of Geography, Back To Basics and Reaching to the Converted quickly get added with a note to come back for more.
Finally, knowing very little about Beirut other than they split opinion every time I introduce them to people, I own Gulag Orkestar, so hoped for a chance to get more. While that was there, this year's March of the Zapaotec and RealPeople Holland, which I don't own elsewhere, is added. So, a pretty firm win for Comes With Music all-round today!
The beauty of Comes With Music is that, unlike iTunes where you have to pay an individual price per track, once you're signed up to CWM you can download whatever you like for free! With this in mind, we've decided to broaden our music collection by introducing a random factor – an album from a music genre we don't normally go for.
The only thing we know about Beethoven was that he was deaf, so we're going to play a little safe and choose The Very Best of Beethoven. Now, 20 tracks and not a catchy chorus among them may prove that we're barbarians banging on the door but at least we're giving it a try, thanks to Comes With Music.
So there you have it, 38 new additions without breaking a sweat - Comes With Music has turned up some real winners today and the family music library is looking stuffed – if the music download service carries on at this rate we'll soon need a new hard drive, as 160GB won't be enough!