Blackstone Group is looking to raise $5 billion for its second Asian fund.
Blackstone is seeing huge potential in Asia and really wants to invest heavily and faster than ever before. Around 66% of their first fund $2.3 billion has been invested.
Blackstone see’s great growth potential in China and India and really wants to get a foot in those markets before they mature.
SellerX is a startup from Berlin that focuses on acquiring top Amazon sellers. SellerX has just raised $118 million led by Cherry Ventures, Felix Capital, TriplePoint Capital, participation from Village Global, et al.
It seems like buying Amazon based businesses is becoming an interesting proposition. Once Amazon sellers get to a certain level they need a lot of back office support and the vast majority aren’t set up to do this. It will be interesting to see if they are able to get a lot of great Amazon sellers together and turn this into a strong long term business.
Shutterstock has acquired AI driven Amper Music.
Amper Music claims to have over 1 million individual audio samples in its catalogue.
It seems like Shutterstock wants to be able to create endless AI driven music and be able to monetize that in its marketplace and keep 100% of the royalties. It will be interesting to see what happens to Amper Music after the transaction closes, as I expect that the company will be completely shutdown immediately.
RouteNote has started offering Free Music Distribution to TikTok and Resso. RouteNote was one of the first music distributors to partner with TikTok and Resso globally and they can provide full access into the platform for no upfront fees and artists and labels keep 85% of the royalties.
TikTok and Resso pay royalties to both artists and labels so its worth adding your music into the music library into TikTok so creators of all shapes and sizes can find you and promote your tracks to a global audience.
It was confirmed that Spotify is buying Megaphone for $235 million.
Megaphone is a podcasting hosting and advertising company – it’s easy to see how this fits into Spotify’s plans for world domination in the podcast market, but it will throw up a lot of concerns on how powerful Spotify is in this market now and how they plan to control all the data around podcasts.
These podcasts should be platform agnostic – like music. However, they seem to be getting acquired and then made exclusive for either Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal or whoever has the most money at the time.
Who is going to lose out? CONSUMERS!
Amuse announced the other day that they were expanding their Fast Forward program – which allows artists to have an advance on their royalties of between $250 and $300,000 (MA).
However, all these “news outlets” forgot to mention that Amuse will be charging artists 12% interest on the loans they provide as advances on their royalties.
12%!
I’m struggling to understand why any artist in the world would consider this a good idea!
This also goes against the artist first idea of Amuse. It’s not artist first in any way!
Google seems to think the future of work lies in between the office and working remotely.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google were currently making changes to its physical spaces to better support employees in the future. He didn’t specific state what those changes were.
“I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai said during a video interview for Time 100. Pichai was an honoree on this year’s list of the most influential people in the world.
“We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new. So we don’t see that changing, so we don’t think the future is just 100% remote or something,” he said.
Pichai said that Google is “reconfiguring” its office spaces to accommodate what he called “on-sites” — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office.
Amuse.io is a new music upstart that has been getting a lot of press of late. Amuse.io has just released their official 2019 financials and it’s very interesting reading.
Revenues = $9.5 million USD
Profit / Loss = $10.9 million USD Loss
Staff = 49 staff
Cash Liquidity = 208%
This basically means that Amuse will need to raise another round of Venture Capital within the remainder of 2020 or start of 2021 to be able to survive.
Source – https://www.merinfo.se/foretag/Amuseio-AB-5590367016/2kgcyso-1hslk
Tesla shares have finished the day at 21.06% down. This is the biggest single day share decline for the company in its history.
Why this matters: Tesla is a company going after a big dream. However, it also seems to be the company that is riding a very high valuation based on very little fundamental numbers being it. Revenues have increase 14% in the past 12 months, but the share price has increased 573%.
My views: I love the company and I love what they are trying to achieve, but it seems like they have become the poster child for a heavily overpriced stock market based on poor fundamentals.
Warren Buffett’s views on Jeff Bezos and how he has changed the world.
Why this matters: Warren Buffett for a long time has been watching Jeff Bezos and commenting on how amazing the run of Amazon has been. It would have been very interesting if Warren Buffett understood the technology industry at the beginning of the internet as it would have provided a lot of great investment opportunities.