HP looks to be making a play for the mobile music streaming business with the acquisition of Seattle-based startup Melodeo.
The IT giant is paying up to $35 million for the business, which delivers music streaming from the cloud to the web or mobile devices, outbidding HTC and other rivals, says blogsiteTech Crunch, which broke news of the deal.
Taiwan-based HTC was also a keen bidder for stricken handset-maker Palm, which HP purchased for $1.2 billion in April.
Melodeo is similar to other music streaming services such as Lala or Pandora, but its strength is in mobile.
Its core product line is nuTsie (an anagram of iTunes), which scans users’ iTunes playlists and allows them to access the playlists on mobile devices across most smartphone platforms.
It has just over 2 million unique visitors a month to its website, with 2 million downloads for the nuTsie apps.
The next version of nuTsie will let users copy their entire music library into the cloud and will also be accessible from multiple platforms, Tech Crunch says.