Seattle entrepreneur Martin Tobias founded Loudeye Corporation as Encoding.com in 1997. The company, which focused on encoding audio and video files for distribution over the internet, changed its name to Loudeye Technologies in 1999. Loudeye’s 2000 initial public stock offering was extremely successful, and the company was valued at $1.4 billion at the time. It expanded into the European market in 2004.

Loudeye never made a quarterly profit, however, and in 2006, its European operations were sold to the Finnish company Nokia for $60 million. Loudeye sold its much smaller U.S. based business to Muze, a digital entertainment company for $11 million.

This 2000 annual report was published the year of Loudeye Technology’s initial public stock offering.

Caption information source: Peterson, Kim, “Loudeye being sold to Nokia”, The Seattle Times, August 9, 2006, retrieved online at https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=20060809&slug=loudeye09.