The battle and gamble over unlimited music services has arrived. Once Nokia (NYSE: NOK) came out of the gate last December with its Comes With Music concept, much of the music industry seems to be following their lead and in some cases beating Nokia to the punch. In Australia today Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) launched an unlimited music download service that costs $2.28 a week, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. All of the big four record labels – Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG, Universal, EMI and Warner – have signed on for the MusicStation service, but only 1 million tracks are available. Nokia said it would have 2 million tracks available on its Comes With Music service through its deal with Universal alone. Since then, Nokia has brought Warner and Sony BMG on board, however EMI is still missing.

Nokia’s music strategy is built around a sizable fee the handset manufacturer will pay to heavily subsidize its service, making a subscription included in the sale price of supported Nokia devices. Comes With Music, which won’t include over-the-air downloads, is expected to launch in the UK next month and includes a year’s worth of unlimited downloads when you buy a device. Nokia’s service will be side-loaded only, but customers will continue to own the music once the year ends. Customers using MusicStation will lose access to their music the minute they cancel their $9-plus monthly subscription.

Sony Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) is expected to launch its own unlimited music download service with all four of the major labels through a partnership with Omnifone in Britain any day now. Omnifone powers MusicStation, the same service Vodafone launched in Australia today, in numerous countries including the UK, Spain and Germany.

Update: Reuters reports that Sony Ericsson has given its unlimited music service a name: Play Now Plus. The company is now anticipating a launch within weeks and says it will allow customers to keep some of the songs after the subscription ends. Whether that means there will be a specific number of tracks customers can choose to keep in perpetuity is still unclear.