Nokia has announced that it is buying Loudeye, a provider of digital music platforms and digital media distribution services, for an amount of nearly $60 million in cash. Nokia says it will launch a comprehensive mobile music experience with the purchase of Loudeye, including providing consumers the ability to buy digital music.
“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,” Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president and general manager, multimedia, Nokia said in a press release.
And, like Apple, Nokia is a gorilla of the tech world - when you sell a third of the world's phones, you can drive a hard bargain for getting content with the sort of pricing and rights deals that customers and CFOs might like. Microsoft is going the same way with its first foray into the MP3 player market, the Zune. Redmond is hoping to follow Apple - and now Nokia for that matter - by taking the whole end-to-end approach with digital music. However, unlike Microsoft, Nokia already has its hardware in millions of people's hands. Now it just needs to give those people a compelling reason to use it and give the operators an equally good reason to keep buying their handsets. Nokia could become especially popular with operators if it can guarantee consumers will want to spend outrageous amounts on downloading music over-the-air to their phone.
I think Apple's next step, will be adding mobile capabilities to their own iPod, or let's call it iMobile instead
Sources
TechTree, http://www.techtree.com/
Silicon, http://networks.silicon.com/
TMC, IP Communications
Tags: Nokia, iPod, Gr33n Data
Will still be called iPod as it is an entire platform more than a MP3 player. More then likely, iPod phone or iPod connect, something along those lines. There's alot of brand value in the iPod name, so they'll stick with it. :)
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