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Nokia Corp. has announced it will be shutting down its Ovi Music unlimited subscription service in 27 countries. The service – similar to Microsoft Corp.’s Zune Pass – allowed people to pay a set fee to access as much music as they wanted, legally and conveniently.

Originally launched with much fanfare in Britain in late 2008, and seen as a major threat to the iTunes dominated market with Nokia securing all four major music publishes, it has seen a sad decline in most markets.

Nokia has chalked this up to the lack of handset support at launch and DRM related concerns from customers due to the songs being locked to their handset. A spokesman for Nokia admitted,  ”the markets clearly want a DRM-free music service.”

Though it will be canceling the service in many countries, Nokia will continue to sell subscriptions to Ovi Music in markets where it currently does well, like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa.

Thankfully Nokia hasn’t left subscribers in the lurch if they live in a country where service is being shut off, since they will be able to continue to access the service until their current subscription runs out.

It’s been a pretty sad few years for Nokia, Once a leader of the smart phone market it’s now an also ran in the standings and with announcements like these it doesn’t paint a rosy picture of the company’s future.