Nokia recently announced that it has completed its acquisition of Loudeye Corp for about $60 million. Loudeye is a leader in digital music distribution across Europe. The company’s digital media offerings range from application development to content acquisition, fulfillment, and distribution with services consisting of encoding media content and metadata content creation.

“With this acquisition completed, Nokia is on target to deliver the best fully integrated mobile music experience to our customers during 2007,” said Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president and general manager, Multimedia, Nokia. “This new team brings the enthusiasm and expertise that make experiences such as our recently announced Music Recommenders service possible. Our vision is to enable people to access all the music they want, anywhere, anytime and at a reasonable cost; this is driving the development of our music offering.”

Digital music is one of the key drivers for selling higher-priced phones and with the acquisition of Loudeye, Nokia intends to capitalize on this. The Nokia music experience will include music optimized devices like the Nokia N91 8GB and other Nokia Nseries multimedia computers. Services like the Nokia Podcasting application will give Nokia users the ability to discover, purchase and manage music.