Nokia buying Loudeye and launching mobile music

Why buy the cow? Because the milk definitely ain't free; Nokia got a taste of their wares back in 2004, but today announced they were buying Loudeye outright. Nope, apparently Nokia just thought it would be cheaper to buy the firm, which (among other things) specializes in the wholesale setting up of new PlaysForSure partners, outright for 60 million. The intention is, we'd imagine, to push hard to bypass all this absurd carrier torpidity and make online digital music something that maybe isn't an incredibly expensive, incredibly painful experience for consumers. Of course, considering the problems they had knocking out their first PlaysForSure compatible musicphone um, multimedia computer, the N91, we might wonder how long they're going to take to make good on the promise. Either way, it looks if you were thinking of setting up shop online to compete with Yahoo and Napster and Real vending tunes, you should probably no longer be looking as closely at enlisting Loudeye's services as you once might have.

[Via Yahoo, thanks Mike]

[greenlight @ Aug 8th 2006 10:46AM]

So, a little jealous of Sony Ericsson's PlayNow, are we?

[Shuki Haiminis @ Aug 8th 2006 12:21PM]

Who else is a competitor in loudeyes market?

[raulr @ Aug 8th 2006 12:24PM]

Actually, Loudeye try's to sell their music stores to wireless carriers so they can brand it as their own Over-The-Air music download store.

[Ludio @ Aug 8th 2006 2:03PM]

Hmm well if you can't nicely talk to the carrier to listen to your ideas buy the source and forces them to listen. I guess we'll see how this turns out.

[Ryan @ Aug 8th 2006 9:13PM]

I bet this will be an iPod killer just like N-Gage was a Gameboy killer.

[samuel @ Sep 20th 2006 6:49AM]

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