Nokia’s Comes With Music never made it to the US, but now one of the local mobile operators is launching its own version. The operator is Cricket, and the service is called Muve Music. It will offer unlimited DRM’d downloads to phones, as part of a $55 monthly plan that also includes unlimited voice calls, texts and web browsing. Warner Music Group EVP Michael Nash has been talking to the LA Times about the service, explaining that Cricket is paying a set monthly fee per subscriber to rightsholders, divvied up according to the popularity of their content. The service launches in January on one handset, the Samsung Suede, and is powered by Wilshire Media Group. As one of the smaller US operators – it has 4.5 million customers – Cricket can be seen as a deliberately-limited testbed for this kind of service in the US.
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