Nokia to release paid upgrade to Lumia-only music service

PanARMENIAN.Net - A few months after jumping in to the free music streaming sector, Nokia is getting ready to give its Lumia-only service a jump-start with a premium upgrade, CNET reports.

Nokia Music+, an upgrade to the free Mix Radio service that Nokia launched last September, will offer Lumia owners unlimited skips and unlimited downloads, the Finnish handset maker announced in a company blog post. The service also will offer higher-quality streams, allowing downloads at eight times the existing quality.

The new service will also offer lyrics for users' mobile devices and a Web app for home use.

"Nokia Music is great for discovering new music, and we've found that there's a core of users that want even more of it," Nokia vice president of entertainment Jyrki Rosenberg said in the post. "This is how Nokia Music+ came about."

The service is expected to roll out in the coming weeks with a price of around $3.99 a month.

The Lumia line helped turn around Nokia's fortunes in the fourth quarter, contributing to the handset maker's profit of 202 million euros ($269 million), a massive gain over the 1 billion euros the company lost during the same period in 2011. However, despite sales off 4.4 million Lumia units worldwide, revenue fell from 10 billion euros in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 8 billion last quarter.