Loudeye’s music sample downloading surpasses 1 billion, the company reports

Loudeye Corp., provider of online digital media services, served 1 billion music samples over licensed digital music sites in the past year, the company announced this week, 91 million more music samples than it served the year before.

In addition, over the past year Loudeye delivered 14 million digital music tracks to its licensed music distribution partners, up 223% from the previous year.

Loudeye now has a base of over 4.5 million full song tracks, an increase of more than 1 million songs in a year. Loudeye says it’s the world`s largest commercially licensed digital music repository.

Loudeye also reported that recent investments in its media operations center have increased Loudeye`s production capacity from a rate of 490,000 digital music files a week to approximately 4.2 million files a week. Loudeye says production capacity refers to the speed at which it can ingest content and deliver a digital output.

"As a result of recent investments in our media operations center we`re delivering digital media to partners around the world on a massive scale. These key milestones represent a solid foundation for continued growth as more companies and major brands enter the legitimate digital media space and content owners from around the world embrace digital distribution," said John Martin, Loudeye`s executive vice president of technology and development. "This increased production activity indicates a growing demand for our end-to-end digital media solutions from companies looking to come to market quickly with the strongest possible offering. Our turnkey digital media application services, including our MusicStore and iRadio products announced at the end of 2003, are expected to play a significant role in our business this year as we power more music stores for our partners and continue our goal of growing the digital music marketplace."