paidContent.org have reported that Buzznet has raised $25 million in a third round of funding. Additionally, it was learned that Universal Music-owned Interscope has invested a few million in it. It hasnt been confirmed who the other investors are, but im guessing some of the funding would have come from previous investors such as Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.
Also, recently, investors Bob Pittman, of the Pilot Group and Sling Media’s Jason Hirschhorn traded their equity stakes in the influential indie music blog Stereogum for an ownership percentage of BuzzNet. Thus, it has been confirmed that Stereogum is now fully owned by Buzznet. Today it has also be reported that Buzznet has now acquired Qloud. Has this new $25 million gone to the acquisition or has it been raised to make Buzznet more like mainstream media.
Minic over at 901am has reported that Spiral Frog is now the third largest legal music download site. Spiral Frog reports that they have 850,000 registered users, thus putting them in third largest behind iTunes and Rhapsody. The company also reports that their traffic is also increasing at a constant rate, already surpassing two million unique visitors for March.
Im not really too sure if Spiral Frog should claim the fact that they are the third largest legal download store, mainly because they dont actually sell anything compared to iTunes and Rhapsody. Therefore, they should really be in first place, because people are willing to sign up to something in which they have the opportunity to get something for free rather than paying.
Direct-to-consumer mobile content service Thumbplay scored $18 million in Series E financing from rookside Capital Partners, the public equity affiliate of Bain Capital, and Cross Creek Capital, a private equity affiliate of Wasatch Advisors.
Thumbplay is behind the mobile content sales for Internet portals like AOL and MSN, as well as offering a branded service to consumers that allow fans to buy content outside of the carrier content menu. The funding will be used to accelerate growth, expand its direct-to-consumer product offerings and to expand internationally.
After about 6 months of announcing plans, the LimeWire store has finally launched. The site is completely separate from the LimeWire peer to peer file sharing application. The company is planning on slowly integrating both services and then finally moving to a legitimate store. All tracks are available as 256kbps MP3 files. Pricing is $.99 for a single track. Or you can get 25 downloads per month for $9.99, 50 for $14.99 or 75 for $19.99. At that last price, you essentially get 75 songs for $.27 each, assuming you actually download 75 tracks each month.
Limewire has already announced some great partnerships including Nettwerk and Redeye. It is going to be very interesting to see how they can prevent customers from downloading music from their store and then sharing the music via their free P2p network.
Disclosure: LimeWire is a partner of RouteNote in which I am currently CEO.
Today Yahoo have announced the release of the brand new version of FoxyTunes, in which they purchased back in February.
The new version is for IE (fresh beta) and it has some great new customisation option to boot. Now you can change the appearance of your FoxyTunes by installing custom skins (we’ve already got 11 skins available) and down the road you’ll be able to create your very own. We’ve even added a FoxyTunes Mini, basically a universal desktop widget that’s a customizable, collapsible, and skinnable version of its big bro. The best part — there’s a timer and alarm clock feature that lets you set your media player to your favorite song.
A while ago digital distribution company CD Baby started to sell their artists Mp’s direct from their own site. This has proved amazing popular and Derek Sivers reports that the company’s direct mp3 sales have exceed the revenues from most of their partners.
CD Baby sold $600,000 in mp3 downloads in the last few months, with NO marketing or announcements at all. Therefore, CD Baby sold more than emusic, Yahoo Music, Sony Connect, Verizon, MSN and Snocap.
The digital distribution space is just about to open up. CD Baby has been one of the leaders in the market, because they offer artists the ability to keep more money in their pockets. CD Baby will soon have a new competitor, RouteNote. RouteNote is a digital distribution company quite similar to CD Baby, but they will have an additional feature of licensing music. Allow artists to also have their music available to be licensed for TV, radio, games, etc, all while selling their music to the worlds largest online stores. Make sure you head over to their site and get a private beta invite.
Disclosures: Steven is currently CEO of Insomnia Ltd, which own and operate RouteNote. Â
Amie Street have just announced today that they have signed the Beggars Group to their service. The Beggars Group consists of labels such as XL, Rough Trade, 4AD, Matador Records and Polyvinyl Recording Co. This means a further 15,000 tracks to the Amie Street catalog.
As most of you already know Amie Street is a music download site that has been funded by the likes of Amazon. This is due to their unique pricing model. All tracks in their catalog start of at being a free download and once the popularity of a certain track increases, then so does the price accordingly. Tracks are finally capped at $0.98 per download. However, one of the most important selling points for the consumer is that the Amie Street tracks are totally DRM free Mp3s.
We have learnt that News Corp is trying to put together a joint venture for Myspace. The joint venture will run in a similar way to the current News Corp video product with NBC Universal. The joint venture will allow the major record labels to sign up to the service and receive a nice equity share in return for their content on the site. The full details have yet to be released, but im guessing the music will be DRM free with some sort of ad support. It is also still unknown if the service will be run as a portal from the myspace header bar or will actually run within the user profiles individually.
Myspace currently has over 7 million bands on their site and it should be hard to leverage this into huge profits, but they are still yet to come up with a plan on how to achieve this. With that amount of music and ability to go straight to market, they should really be challengers to Amazon, Rhapsody and iTunes.
paidContent report that no major labels are yet to sign, but the theory is that once one sign the rest will follow. I think Myspace are getting this whole situation wrong. They shouldnt just limit themselves to major labels, because they are in decline. Myspace should work on creating a tool in the admin of artist profiles which allows them to create a widget on their own individual sites. Thus, it will then have a tie in with a credit card company and the music will be directly delivered to your inbox. This solution also cuts out the problem of Paypal, but doesnt eliminate the issue of which currency to use on the system (because $US is in heavy decline). However, im very interested to see what system they adopt.
RouteNote is the new product by Insomnia Ltd, in which im currently CEO. RouteNote has just launched a new weblog which will discuss all the happenings are the music industry as well as profile artists and partners that sign to the RouteNote.
About RouteNote
RouteNote is an online music licensing and distribution service providing artists instant access to a large proportion of the online market, and delivering an innovative licensing service to the creative media industry. Designed and built to take advantage of the shift towards independent and self-publication through online and mobile music outlets, and the consumer switch to online purchasing as outlined by the success of iTunes, Myspace and Pump Audio, RouteNote is partnered with some of the biggest retailers on the web to give artists massive and immediate availability for their tracks.
Onsite, artists can upload tracks to the RouteNote catalogue and enter into a non exclusive agreement permitting us to offer their music for licensed use in media projects like films, TV shows, games and websites. They then select partnered retail outlets that they wish their music to be available through (e.g. Napster, Snocap, Samsung Mobile) and within moments their songs are earning money as part of a world wide, web wide, distribution network. Our rates for providing a distribution service are currently the best in the market, and our ever expanding catalogue gives us increasing muscle with which to negotiate deals from which everyone, artists, clients and distribution partners included will all benefit.
Creative media clients wishing to license music through RouteNote for use in their projects can use our intuitive browse and search facilities to quickly find the tracks they need and generate a license individually tailored to their purpose within minutes. Our teams experience of media production gives us first hand knowledge of the way clients source music, meaning the site is designed to let users find appropriate music efficiently and intuitively. Users have the ability to create and save shortlists of search terms, tracks and license terms for multiple projects making our service easy to use for first timers, and even more helpful for repeat customers.
I noticed this very interesting report on the linchpin from the Pirate Bay. What side to the story do you take? Is there company illegal or is it all fair game (until all governments unite and join forces in terms on internet laws).
Yahoo have been in the news a lot lately, with Microsoft trying to buy out the company, while at the same time they have been making smaller headlines of their own. Today Yahoo made two announcements, they are going to stop their current music service and partner with Rhapsody to provide a new service, and they have also purchased FoxyTunes, a developer of a tool-bar plug-in that enables users to control more than 30 desktop and Web-based music players.
This makes an acquisition by Microsoft all the more interesting since Rhapsody and the Zune Marketplace would become a sibling rivalry. With relevance to FoxyTunes none of the details have been released, but we will let you know more when the information becomes available.
Audioholics has commemorated their 10th anniversary with a bang and has launched their own online store front. This is a big step for the home theater review publication, the store will be the first of its kind to be built on the back of an industry-leading magazine.
Audioholics currently has an existing base of over 1 million readers per month and to leaverage this readership into purchasing some of the leading electronics brand should be a simple process that will lead to great success.
The Audioholics store is a partnership between Audioholics and Woodland Venture Holdings LLC. Funding for the project was lead by an undisclosed CEO of a large asset management company. Woodland Ventures operates some of the top e-commerce stores online in which currently serve a customer base of over 50 thousand customers per year. This is a great match for Audioholics because Woodland have ventures based in this online store market and they know how the industry works and operates. The store itself lists premium brands from all over the electronics industry, including Yamaha, VizionWare and APC.
Apart from the basics of an online store the Audioholics store will also included added features such as an email client, forum and a customi`ed help support. However, the key features to this new Audioholics online store is that it provides lifetime product support, free 3-year extended warranties, free shipping on most of it product lines, and all products carry a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.
There is a real opportunity for Audioholics to leverage on either its strong readership numbers, great partnership with professionals in leading the industry (Woodland Ventures), or even on the decent amount of traffic to their website. Which ever way they approach this opportunity I always like seeing new companies in the online sales market, who can provide com®®petitive price, premium brands and great customer service. If you are a bit of a techie and like to equip your home or workplace with high end electronics then make sure you check out the new Audioholics store.
