Nokia have signed Loudeye to develop and advanced wireless digital music platform for their range of mobile handsets. The announcement comes days after Motorola and Apple got together to bring iTunes to mobile phones.
No details on the platform have yet been released, but the deal is for several years.
“This agreement with Nokia represents a significant strategic opportunity for Loudeye to work with the leading mobile communications company in the world to develop an advanced wireless music platform,” said Jeff Cavins, Loudeye’s president and chief executive officer. “We are very excited about our relationship with Nokia and look forward to sharing more details in the future.”
This is another early step showing that online music services and handset manufacturers believe that mobile phones have tremendous potential as tools for listening to, and buying, digital music.
Loudeye recently acquired OD2, Europe’s leading white label music download service and claims to have the world’s largest music archive. We’ll be interested to see how the service ties in with Visual Radio, if at all. If Visual Radio gets a proper European or worldwide launch, then it may form the basis of a service for radio listeners to buy and download music heard during broadcasts.
Loudeye
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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