Nokia have now announced that the Nokia Music Store is now the Ovi Music Store. The intergation of the music store into the broader range of services under the Nokia Ovi stable (Email, Maps, Apps and Games previously.) The Nokia Music Store originally opened its digital doors on the 24^th of April 2009, providing a legal online music source for South African users. Since then their store has grown immensly with now more than 6 million tracks available for download.

Ovi Music will continue to offer local and international music at the same cost of R10 per track or R100 per album.  However the big news here is that Nokia has done away with their music copyright system – DRM. All tracks that have been purchased from the store are now DRM free. So now the music you have paid for is yours – copy it to your flash, burn to CD etc. No more restrictions. Good work Nokia.

The store has also got an overhaul – the fact that you can now acess the store within your browser (instead of downloading the full player) makes it a lot more user friendly. Add to that the fact that they are now supporting other browsers like Safari & Firefox and the Ovi Music store looks to be a significant improvement over the old store.

Check out the Ovi Music Store here.