According to the analysts from comScore, only a quarter of European mobile users listen to music on their phones. At the same time people prefer to download audio tracks to mobile phones via computer, rather than through the gadget itself.

The 23.8% of residents of the five major European markets – Britain, France, Italy, Spain and Germany – use music player of their phones. The 20.3% of respondents use computers to supplement the audio library and only 1.9% consider easy to upload new music tunes through special applications of music stores that are included in the device.

European audiophiles more often use Apple iTunes (28%), but there are also quite a lot of people using Nokia Music Store (22%). About 4,300,000 people buy tracks in online stores. The Finnish giant has obviously all chances to surpass Cupertino at least here.

Unfortunately, less than 1 million users at the five required European markets have been looking forward to the launch of Music Store, when it opened in 2007.

Oddly enough, listening to mobile music is not a very popular idea, as it could be expected, especially even inexpensive cell phones are equipped with media player. In the U.S. that figure is even lower – 13.2%.

According to the online media, Nokia is preparing a re-branding of its online music store Nokia Music Store. Although the Finnish company has made no official statements, obviously, the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones is going to change the Nokia Music Store into Ovi Music.

But the most interesting fact is that, according to The Symbian Blog, the new Ovi Music will offer its customers music without DRM protection. This means that you can listen to all the songs downloaded by a user with this service on any device that supports the specified format (for example, cell phones from other manufacturers, MP3 players, computers, etc.)

Such intentions are generally consistent with the recent plans of Nokia, according to which the Finnish company is going to attract consumers through improved and even free services, for example, Nokia Ovi Maps. It is unclear, though, that will happen with other music services of Nokia – Comes with Music, for creation and promotion of which the company have invested much effort and money. The exact date of launch of the new Ovi Music is not reported yet. Perhaps this will happen in the next few months, or after the release of first smartphones running Symbian ^ 3.