Comes With Music: Building a library Queen to Queens of Stone Age
By Mike Browne on August 11,
 2009 at 00:00,

Comes With Music is part of Nokia Music and offers an all-you-can-eat music download service. With well over 6 million tracks to choose from, it's one of the most comprehensive services around and we've been putting it to the test. We've reached the Letter Q and quite frankly, have had more than a little trouble finding artists to get excited about. See how we get on with building a library of Letter Q  acts using Comes With Music...

Comes With Music has so far added more than 370 albums to our burgeoning music collection and we're only just over half way through this experiment. However, it seems we've hit something of a brickwall with the Letter Q. It's not that Comes With Music hasn't enough tunes, there were over six million at last count. No the problem is, we can't think if that many artists bringing with the letter!

Things start badly when daughter of the house comes up with nothing at all! We decide the best way forward are to pool resources and even then, the pickings are a bit slim.

The most obvious band to choose is Queen and thankfully Comes With Music doesn't disappoint, throwing up the entire back catalogue of the super-group. So, whether it's the early albums such as A day at the Races, A Night at the Opera, News of the World, or even Flash Gordon, you'll be able to pick them up. If you just want to cut to the best stuff, then you'll be able to go for The Greatest Hits, The Greatest Hits II and even The Greatest Hits III – more than enough for anyone!

Maybe not as big in terms of sales but still something of a rock monster, are Queens of the Stone Age. You'll find that all four of their studio albums are present on Comes With Music , starting with 2000's Rated R, through to Songs for the Deaf, Lullabies to Paralyse and even the most recent Era Vulgaris. However, we're a little disappointed to see that none of the 'Desert Recordings' have made it on to Comes With Music , as they throw up some interesting collaborations with other artists.

Bending the rules of the experiment a bit allows me to come up with one act – A Tribe Called Quest – well, it have Q in there at some point! It seems there are three Best Of albums on Comes With Music , The Best Of, Hits, Rarities & Remixes and The Anthology. However, even this last one only has 19 tracks, so it's clear the band wasn't too prolific. We opt for the Best Of, largely because it starts with 'Can You Kick it?'

The only other artist we can think of is Queen Latifah and even the kids say 'Who?' at that one. Not being sure how many albums she's actually released, or whether they're good, we play the safe best and pick She's A Queen: A Collection of Greatest Hits and leave it at that.

With so few acts to choose from we still manage to bad 13 new albums. So, there we have it, Letter Q may be rather thin on the ground in terms of acts, but Comes With Music has managed to deliver everything we would expect from the service.

Random Album: With no music genre to choose from and the Letter Q being something of a wash out, we decide to give the Random Album a miss this week.

Letter Q: 13 albums downloaded

390 Comes With Music albums downloaded to date