Nokia to acquire Loudeye — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{USD 60 million investment in mobile music} Nokia to acquire Loudeye

9 Aug 2006 at 06:25 GMT Timo Poropudas

Nokia will buy Nasdaq-listed Loudeye Corp. The companies announced yesterday that they have signed an agreement for Nokia to acquire Loudeye for approximately USD 60 million.

Loudeye is a global leader of digital music platforms and digital media distribution services with about 30 percent market share of distributed pieces.

Under the terms of the agreement, Loudeye stockholders will receive USD 4.50 per share in cash for each share of Loudeye common stock.

By acquiring Loudeye, Nokia can offer consumers a comprehensive mobile music experience, including devices, applications and the ability to purchase digital music.

The multi-function mobile device will become the preferred medium for enjoying music and Nokia is leading this trend. With music optimized products like the Nokia N91 and other Nokia devices, Nokia sold more than 15 million music enabled devices in the 2nd quarter, making it the world’s largest manufacture of digital music players.

“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,” said Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president and general manager, Multimedia, Nokia.

Loudeye operates 60 live services in over 20 countries and multiple languages across Europe and South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Loudeye aggregates rights and content from all the major labels and hundreds of independents and currently offers licensed catalog and complete media for over 1.6 million tracks.