Melodeo

About Melodeo

Melodeo, Inc. operated as a mobile media delivery company, positioning itself in the nascent cloud-based music streaming market of the late 2000s.

The Seattle-based firm was established with its initial venture capital funding secured in January 2004, followed by a Series B round of $9.5 million in late 2004 and a Series C round in 2007. The company's primary offering was Nutsie.com (an anagram of iTunes), a service designed to bridge the gap between users' home computer music libraries and their mobile devices. The Nutsie application enabled customers to stream their iTunes playlists over the air to various mobile phones, effectively creating a personal internet radio experience based on their own music collection. This addressed a significant point of friction for users on platforms like Android, which at the time had less integrated music solutions.

Melodeo's business model focused on providing mobile access not just to music, but also to other audio content such as comedy, news, and sports programming. The company was developing an enhanced version of its service to allow users to upload and stream their entire iTunes libraries, evolving from a playlist-centric model to a full-fledged online music locker. In a notable partnership, Melodeo collaborated with Bing to launch an iPhone app called "Top 100s by Year by Bing," which allowed users to listen to top songs from 1948 to 2009.

The strategic value of Melodeo's technology attracted the attention of major hardware players. On June 23, 2010, Hewlett-Packard acquired Melodeo for a reported sum of around $30 million. The acquisition was widely interpreted as a strategic move by HP to integrate a native music streaming service into its WebOS mobile platform, which it had recently acquired from Palm. This placed HP in direct competition with Apple's acquisition of Lala and Google's purchase of Simplify Media, as the industry shifted towards cloud-based media consumption.