Nokia has announced an agreement to purchase Loudeye for aproximately $60m. Loudeye is a digital music company with access to 1.6m tracks. Nokia wants to use Loudeye to launch its own music store that will be built into its music devices. Nokia expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter.
"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."'
Nokia sold over 15 million digital music capable devices in the second quarter alone. That total is enough to make Nokia the world's largest manufacturer of digital music players (in a related note, the company is also the largest seller of digital cameras).
As long as they don't charge a crazy amount like Sprint and Verizon do it should be successful.
The walled garden is comming down!!!
Great move for Nokia. While Loudeye is very expensive to develop music portals, I think it will give Nokia what they are looking for.
I'm waging that US carriers won't be willing to carry devices with a Nokia music store built-in. Right now the stores are from Sprint and Verizon which don't carry many Nokia devices (thanks to the CDMA networks), but I doubt Cingular wants to give up that potential revenue either.