Nokia’s Loudeye Acquisition Points to New Mobile Business Models

Fresh on the heels of the announcement that Telestream had acquired Popwire, Loudeye宣布已同意被诺基亚收购. 正如我们在 可以当时，Loudeye已经出售了其在美国的资产.S. 为木兹提供音乐服务, which provided Muze with what it claims is the world’s largest label-sanctioned catalog, 由最深的增强, 最全面的, 和最准确的音乐数据库可用.

This left Loudeye with its white-label music service business, 其中包括大约75家自有厂牌音乐商店, 主要在欧洲, 南非, 和澳大利亚. Under the OD2 heading, these services at the time had accounted for $6.该公司在报告季度的营收为400万美元, accounting for more than 75% of the company’s total revenues.

诺基亚从这笔交易中获益良多, 然后, is a series of high-profile music stores that already have the ability to download to personal music devices as well as cell phones. 但这仅仅是个开始. 它允许诺基亚拥有编码, 分布, 播放设备, in a way that no other company–except Apple excepted–has been able to muster.

Some pundits are decrying the move as a cheap way for Nokia to gain market exposure as an innovative company. According to Jeremy Silver, who describes himself on his blog as a former employee of encoding.com, Loudeye’s former moniker, the Loudeye purchase is strictly about OD2.

"The extraordinary thing about this purchase is that it appears to be made up of the OD2 business only, 因为大眼镇已经所剩无几了,西尔弗说. "The OD2 music 分布 system has for a long time supplied in white label form the service for a number of European retailers - Tiscali, HMV, 和其他人 . . . 它永远都需要重新设计, but the exigencies of business and underinvestment never seem to have allowed that to happen."

The Loudeye acquisition could also be considered counter-intuitive and potentially threatening to Nokia’s core customer base as a mobile phone service provider. 事实上, these service providers routinely ask Nokia and other handset providers to eliminate features (such as WiFi) that might allow customers to gather content "off network" without involving the mobile service provider’s data bandwidth, which is a significant and growing portion of these providers’ revenues.

But Nokia now has an end-to-end solution that it can provide to these same mobile phone service providers. 通过提供编码, 虚拟音乐店面, and the ability to play this content on "enhanced" Nokia handsets, some of which may involve specific and proprietary digital rights management, Nokia frees the mobile handset provider from the potential cycle that siphoned a significant amount of revenue from their landline counterparts in the late 1990s dot-com craze.

当时，MCI/WorldCom, At&T, 有线和无线, 冲刺, and many of the other traditional landline providers vacillated between thinking they were software houses, building services to sell to customers who would in turn use the provider’s bandwidth, 并像传统的电话和带宽提供商一样行事. 这种软件之家方法, often pitched to potential customers as custom-coded solutions sold at off-the-shelf prices, was based on poor ROI models that required a lengthy "captive audience" contract to even approach breakeven.

Mobile phone providers have begun to move down this same slippery slope, but innovative companies like Nokia that have pre-existing relationships with the mobile service providers (and a few key startups) actually give the service providers a way to sell bandwidth and provide differentiation from other service providers, allowing the service providers to turn their focus from software creation back to their core competency of selling bandwidth and minutes.

For its part, Nokia only paid approximately two times annual revenues, or $60 million, for Loudeye. 即使有几家公司宣布, 比如可口可乐, are abandoning online music stores for newer marketing schemes, Nokia can easily recoup its cost with a contract from one key service provider.

Other encoding and music 分布 companies may be following suit. According to a recent AP article, Napster has been courting top-tier service providers. 它与SunCom签约，SunCom是一家AT公司&T Wireless在美国东南部的营销合作伙伴.S. 现在有了自己的网络, and has also announced an agreement with Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo Inc.

"We do not have our heads in the sand regarding a possible merger or acquisition,Napster首席执行官兼董事长克里斯·戈洛格说, Napster的董事长兼首席执行官. "We continue to receive a lot of interest in the company and would like to assure our investors that we will always carefully weigh any value creation alternatives against the opportunity and risk associated with continuing as a stand-alone company."

这是否意味着苹果将立即面临竞争? 可能不是, as it will take at least three quarters for Nokia to complete the Loudeye acquisition and consolidate the encoding and 分布 services. And it is expected to take another two quarters to produce handsets that would handle a Nokia-specific 分布 model. 但在推翻当前市场领导者的行动中, 谁占据了数字音乐下载市场80%的份额, 15 months is not such a long time if the mobile service providers cooperate.