Great news from Nokia yesterday: DRM free music coming to China. Whenever anyone mentions DRM free music, my heart takes a leap and I wonder whether they have really got it right this time.

Yue Sui Xiang, as the service will be known locally, is coming with music in a small group of new handsets yet to be released over here, these are the Nokia X6 32GB and Nokia X6 16GB, Nokia 5230, Nokia 5330, Nokia 5800w, Nokia 6700s, Nokia E52 and Nokia E72i. I wondered whether Nokia had updated the Chinese Comes With Music webstore? Grabbing my trusty E71, I fired up the browser on China Mobile GPRS and loaded the embedded home page. Imagine my suprise to see the image rendered above left: a blank page.

You would have thought that Nokia might have learned from the experience of the Ovi launch that it’s important to get it, well, as right as you possibly can first time. Given their available resources, how hard would it be to refresh a few pages before firing out a Press Release to the World?

And therein lies the problem. Whilst my mostly Western RSS was full of recycled Nokia puff this morning, local news was pretty quiet. Is saying you’re doing great things in China more important than actually delivering?

Just for research purposes, I hoofed it over to Baidu on the E71 browser and in just a couple of clicks (and barely ten seconds wait time) I had downloaded Lady Gaga’s Telephone, DRM Free. Didn’t pay a cent.

It’s a tough market to crack.

PS. If you’re interested in China Media news from a Chinese perspective, but you cannot read Chinese, I heartily recommend: Danwei.