For a long time I’ve been a pirate. Yes, I’ll admit to not buying music legally. The thing is, buying music from a physical store is a tiresome process. You’ve got to get in your car, fight the crowds in the mall and then once you actually get into the store you’re left having to deal with a sales attendant who can barely help you. Once you’ve bought the disc I end up ripping it and putting it on my PC/iPod/Phone/Music player and then the CD gets stored on my shelf for posterity. Simply put, buying a CD for me these days is akin to buying a hundred and fifty rand coaster. I tend only to buy the albums from bands that I really want to collect even though I mostly have downloaded that album off Bittorrent two weeks before release anyway.

Being a pirate doesn’t keep me awake at night but I certainly don’t mind paying for decent music and while I couldn’t care if Lars Ulrich has to fly in first class rather than his own private jet, I do feel pretty bad stiffing South African bands out of their money.

A few months ago, the Nokia Music Store was launched and at ten rand a track it was pretty reasonable. Other services go for about sixteen rand a track but the real appeal of the Nokia Music Store was that of buying an album (no matter how many tracks) for a flat hundred bucks. I’ve probably bought three albums and about ten tracks off the service and it’s been fairly excellent in that time.

This previous Thursday I was invited to the launch of the newest extension to the Nokia Music Store, a service called “Comes With Music”. Basically you buy either a Nokia 5130, 5530 or 5630 and you get unlimited music downloads on either the device or one computer that you initially set the phone up on. Considering you get access to over five million tracks on the Nokia Music Store for twelve months, this is worth the price of entrance. I’m not entirely sure of the monthly cost of the other two devices but the 5130 costs a mere R100 a month.

At the event we were given either a 5530 or 5630 to test for an entire year and I chose the touchscreen 5530. Now it only has a 2G Internet connection (there is wi-fi though) but the 5630 is a T9, candybar device which is something I personally don’t like. The touchscreen is a mere (compared to my N97) 2.9-inches but is actually the most responsive Nokia touchscreen I’ve ever used. Needless to say, this beats its predecessor the bigger, more feature-filled 5800 in almost all ways. While the device comes with a stylus I’ve been typing perfectly on its full on-screen keyboard with my fingers. I’m sure it would get tiresome typing like this while on the move but this is more of a touchscreen device issue than a problem with the phone.

While the phone is exceptionally capable it really comes alive with “Comes With Music”. I’ve had this phone for three days now and I’ve burned through about a gig of music downloads. If you consider that for as little as a hundred rand a month you’ve got access to unlimited music. I do actually think this is probably the most revolutionary service to happen to the music industry since the introduction of the CD. Combine “Comes With Music” with a program such as Shazam (that identifies a song just by hearing the audio) and you’ve got the ability to download any song you hear on the radio, TV show or even when you’re out at a party.

Do yourself a favour and get “Comes With Music” if you can, it’ll change the way you consume and enjoy music.