Nokia today announced the Nokia Music Store as part of the Ovi platform. Here are a few little details surrounding the service based on the Q&A session held during the Nokia Virtual Event.
The Nokia Music Store will be available globally. During this year there will be major European markets launched and then next year also many countries globally, e.g. in Asia. Music store will be fully localized for each country. The Music store will use DRMed WMA audio files encoded at 192kbit/s. Nokia music store is the first one to provide seamless user experience between mobile and PC. User can access the store from the mobile or from PC — and also synch files between these domains. They are also providing streaming service for PC in addition to normal song download (albums and á la carte download) . Currently, streaming service is only available for PC but they are studying the possibility to use that also directly from the mobile. Naturally the bandwidth has been major restriction in the past.
The streaming service is subscription based, paid by the monthly fee of 10€ amonth (8 pound for UK).. Then you can stream the whole catalog on from PC. Music downloads are not subscription based, users just have to login into the site in order to be able to make purchases. The current prices are set at 1€ a tune or 10€ per album.

There has been some speculation as to why Nokia did not go the DRM-free route. The Nokia reps said that they are constantly monitoring industry trends, but currently they are using DRM because “DRM is required by many content owners and Nokia wants to provide as much content as possible in Nokia music store.” The product manager also indicated that over-the-air downloading is supported by N81 and all the newly announced handsets. “Older devices starting from N91 are supporting WMDRM via PC (transfer purchased songs from PC)”. The transfer of music using the PC will be done using Windows Media Player or upcoming Nokia PC client for music management. Nokia PC client will be available during this year and it will also support albums arts with Nokia devices.