Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) won’t be outdone by Nokia (NYSE: NOK). The struggling handset maker is launching an all-you-can eat mobile music service in the next few weeks, in an attempt to boost flagging handset sales.

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Sony Ericsson’s Play Now Plus service will only be available through mobile operators and will give subscribers access to millions of songs from the big four labels. At the end of a subscriber’s contract—typically from 6-18 months—they will be allowed to keep up to 300 songs. The service will launch first in Sweden, with carrier Telenor and roll out to Europe starting next year, with other parts of the world following in the middle of the year. Reuters reports that it will cost 99 Swedish crowns ($15) a month. SE is also rolling out a new handset for the service, the W902 Walkman phone.

The news follows on the heels of Nokia’s announcement that they would be launching their ambitious “Comes With Music” service in the UK on October 2. In comparison to SE’s Play Now Plus, which is powered by subscription music service provider Omnifone, the cost of “Comes With Music” will be bundled into the price of the handset. Unlike Play Now Plus, in which users will be able to keep up to 300 songs after their operator contract expires, CWM will allow customers to keep all of the songs they’ve downloaded, which will continue to work on their computers or on their CWM handset.

While handset makers and operators are increasingly turning to music to help differentiate their products and to spur sales, it’s questionable how much the addition of music services will help in the immediate term, and how long these services might have to be subsidized before consumer appetite for them begins to pay off. Sony Ericsson’s head of content Martin Blomkvist has said last month, “The way it is set up today, very few people, apart from the record industry, are getting rich on digital music. Generally speaking, the music today isn’t generating a boat load of cash for us.”

Sony Ericsson, meanwhile, needs all the help it can get. It’s slipped to number five in the ranking of handset manufacturers, and reported a 2 million euro operating loss in the second quarter. The company said it expected tough times, or what it called “challenging marketing conditions” to continue into next year. Its Global sales head Anders Runevad told Reuters that the company was basically hunkering down, and would focus on its “core high-end segment” and “play to its strengths” before trying to make a run for a bigger piece of the market. Unlike Nokia and Samsung, they will not be leaping into the lower-end of the handset market and into emerging markets to get more volume. Runevad said while the company still saw lots of opportunities in China and India, it would focus more on its “traditional strengths”, and would also try to improve its standing in the US.