The news
Nokia is buying the Loudeye media-download service with the aim of selling music to millions of users of its mobile phones. It's promising to deliver, "a comprehensive mobile music experience, including devices, applications and the ability to purchase digital music".
The company reckons that "multi-function mobile device will become the preferred medium for enjoying music" and that it is "leading this trend". In the second quarter of the year alone, it says, it sold 15 million music-enabled devices - Nokia prefers to call them "devices", not phones.
Apple iPods might get all the headlines but that doesn't stop Nokia from claiming that it is already the world's largest maker of digital music players.
Loudeye runs 60 live services in 20-plus countries across Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It's claimed to "aggregate rights and content from all the major labels and hundreds of independents and offer complete media for over 1.6 million tracks".
Nokia's Nseries devices are said to combine music player, "high-memory capacity", FM radio and support for "a wide range of digital music formats including MP3, M4A, AAC and WMA".
The Nseries phones, Nokia says, also let you "quickly and easily find and purchase music over the air and download it to your device from your music store". Alternatively, users can transfer personal or purchased music from a PC via Bluetooth or USB.
Discussing the strategy behind the $60 million takeover, Nokia's executive vice president and general manager for multimedia, Anssi Vanjoki, is quoted as saying,
Music is a key experience
for Nokia and Nokia Nseries multimedia
computers and we want to be able to offer the best fully integrated
mobile music experience to our customers. Loudeye brings a number of
key assets to Nokia, including a great team of people, a substantial
content catalogue and a robust service platform that will help us to
achieve this objective.
People should be able to access all the music they want, anywhere, anytime and at a reasonable cost. With this acquisition, we aim to deliver that vision and a comprehensive music experience to Nokia device owners during 2007.
People should be able to access all the music they want, anywhere, anytime and at a reasonable cost. With this acquisition, we aim to deliver that vision and a comprehensive music experience to Nokia device owners during 2007.
Check out Nokia's press release on page two and let us know your thoughts on this latest development in the music-download market over in this thread in the HEXUS.community.
HEXUS.links
HEXUS.community :: discussion thread about this articleExternal.links
Nokia - home pageNokia - Nseries "devices"
Loudeye - home page
