HP offers music with laptops

1000 free tracks, but with DRM?

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29 September 2009 12:56 GMT / By Duncan Geere

HP are reported to be offering free music downloads with new laptops that consumers buy. In a move that echos Nokia's questionable Comes With Music service, anyone that buys a new laptop will a scratchcard thrown in with a PIN number on it.

You can then visit a dedicated website and register that PIN number to gain access to a catalogue provided by Universal Music where you can pick up to 1000 tracks to download. Good luck playing those on your iPod though, it looks like they come with DRM that'll limit you to a year's listening. At the end of that year, you can pick 120 to keep.

The offer seems to be limited to Asia (though not Japan), and will be available on HP notebooks from 24 October. Sandy Monteiro, Universal Music Group's Asian VP of Digital, remarked: "We are keen to explore such deals to get consumers familiar with the new environment and using devices like computers and mobile phones to listen to music. It incentivises them to learn to enjoy music via devices other than traditional hardware".

Parellel to that deal, customers buying HP laptops after that date will also get access to 12 videgames from Wild Tangent. It's not clear what the games are.

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