Nokia is offering a new streaming Nokia Music service in the US, letting Nokia Lumia smartphone users tune into millions of songs for free. But this isn’t a Rdio or Spotify-like service where you can stream any song at any time.
Instead, it’s more of a Pandora-like internet radio service which lets you stream playlists to your phone for free.
At launch, Nokia offers 150 “exclusive playlists” curated by a team of experts, as well as playlists created by artists including Lady Gaga and Rihanna.
Users can also create their own playlists based on artists — but you can’t simply stream whole albums from that artist.
Nokia Music also lets you cache songs for offline playback, and features a “gig finder” which lets you find nearby performances based on your location.
The service is available for free on Nokia’s Lumia handsets running Windows Phone software. But it’s also linked to the Nokia Music store, where the company is hoping you spend some money buying MP3 versions of the songs you hear.