Comments on: Nokia Snags Loudeye http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/ Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:01:09 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Cliff http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121826 Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:22:00 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121826 How stupid is Nokia? They paid $4.5 a share for a company that had dropped to under $1 a share.

What would have happened had Nokia paid $1 per share? The Loudeye employees, who have been dreaming for years of ‘going big’ and maybe a fortuitous buyout, would have been shafted. Nokia could have, but it would have been opportunistic vulturism, and the people who’d be hurt most will become Nokia employess, and will work on this new Nokia product after the buyout.

The bottom line isn’t as simple as “nokia could have saved $45 million”. I work for avvenu, which was also recently acquired by Nokia. We feel like Nokia’s taking good care of us, and we’re doing our best to bring our product to market under Nokia’s name. Nokia takes care of us, we take care of Nokia.

Also, you can’t look at this purchase simply in terms of “Nokia’s getting into music distribution.” Go to the OVI site, check out the whole platform (which at this point is still very exploratory). The idea is to create a whole transparent easy platform across peoples’ devices and PCs, which can do most common tasks with a couple clicks.

]]> By: Matt W http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121825 Wed, 09 Aug 2006 04:35:23 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121825 Nokia tried to make a direct-to-consumer play years ago with “club nokia”. They were eventually forced to take it down (or most of it) as the carriers freaked out. The problem is that, in markets where carriers dominate (ie most of the developed world), carriers are not happy when handset manufacturers try to get service revenue from their customers. Will be interesting to see how this pans out. Will Nokia go around the operators? Will the operators let them? (Don’t forget the operators can largely control what software is pre-installed on the handset.)

]]> By: Rafat http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121824 Tue, 08 Aug 2006 18:22:42 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121824 Katie
Loudeye’s troubles had nothing to do with the issues in the mobile music industry…it had everything to do with two things:
– the low margins business of online music
– the troubles Loudeye had in coming up with a mobile music solution working with Nokia since 2004. These were management and technical issues, not so much anything to do with “the bigger issues around mobile music downloads”, as you put it. Though those issues in and of itself are valid, but not just in this case.

]]> By: Erik Schwartz http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121823 Tue, 08 Aug 2006 18:20:24 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121823 The problem that loudeye (and many others in the space have) is that the margins on music in general are dreadful. If you’re business is getting a slice of the retail margin you’re in trouble.

]]> By: km4 http://gigaom.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121822 Tue, 08 Aug 2006 18:17:42 +0000 http://gigaom.wordpress.com/2006/08/08/nokia-snags-loudeye/#comment-121822 How stupid is Nokia ?

“Nokia said it is paying $4.50 per share. Loudeye’s stock had sat under $1 for weeks, mostly because investors did not give the money losing music service any chance of making it to the black. It had lost $4.6 million for the first quarter of this year on sales of $8.7 million”.

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