Beggars Music Group Financials for 2021 – Revenues up 29.7% Year on Year

Beggars Music Group had a strong 2021 (as they have just released their numbers in a filing on UK Companies House).

Beggars Group generated GBP 79.98 million in 2021 – which was up 29.7% year on year.

This figure includes Beggars’ share of various joint venture businesses including XL Recordings, Matador and Rough Trade, in each of which Beggars owns 50%.

Beggars is a huge player in independent music market and it’s great to see that they are still growing strong and getting a strong slice of the market.

Creating a Brand is Hard and It Takes at Least 5 Years!

The other day we official launched RouteNote Create under the RouteNote umbrella.

RouteNote Create was originally intended to be a standalone product – but I learnt a lot about starting a brand over the past 12 months and it is getting harder and harder with time to build meaningful brands online. The landscape and places you need to be visible are getting larger and larger and it’s very difficult trying to keep them all up to date and heading in the same direction with the same branding, tone of voice and message.

Note to self – If you are going to build a brand – then make sure it focuses on a new customer type and expect it to take at least 5 years to really show fruit!

Im Tired of YouTube Investment “Gurus”

There are so many investment “gurus” on YouTube and it simply just feels like this is now a step above a used car salesman!

Here is a very good example – Investment Advice! When he simply just adds his money into a very basic Vanguard ETF based off the S&P500.

This is probably as far as it gets from someone who should actually be giving investment advice!

What you really should be watching is video interviews from Warren Buffett – and then also spending a huge amount of time reading and working out your own way to value companies and their intrinsic value.

Fidelity Investments Slashing Valuations on Reddit, Stripe, Bytedance and Instacart

It seems like private market valuations for startups are getting slashed because of overall economic outlooks. In the past few months we have seen heavy declines in the public markets and now the private markets are following behind.

Fidelity Investments is cutting some of its portfolio company valuations.

  • Reddit valuation is down by more than a third.
  • Stripe valuation is down by about 13%
  • Bytedance valuation is down by 13%
  • Instacart is valued at half of its value from last year.

These are only private valuations inside of Fidelity and this was back in April – so its expected that these valuations have dropped even more since then.

It’s a tough time economically for everyone!

Johnny Depp Wins Defamation Case Against Amber Heard

It seems like the entire world has been gripped with the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard trial – and it finally came to a conclusion a few hours ago.

  • The jury has awarded Depp $10m (£8m) in compensatory damages and $5m in punitive damages
  • The jury found that Heard’s statements about her marriage were “false” and she acted with “actual malice”
  • But jurors also found that Depp defamed Heard – through his attorney – and awarded her $2m

This trial seems to have been a circus from start to finish and Johnny Depp has cleared his name, but apart from that there are very limited winners in this matter.

It made good TV for some!

Apple Tap to Pay is Going to Help Small Businesses Accept Card Payments Immediately – No Hardware or Contracts Required!

Apple announced back in February that they were going to launch Tap to Pay.

Tap to Pay is a new feature that will enable any merchant to accept payments with only an iPhone – this could obviously really hurt companies that take a cut in the middle like Square or Stripe.

This is going to be an amazing feature for small businesses – who wont need any new hardware or contracts. Just an Apple phone and a dream!

Now, it turns out that Apple is already testing the feature at its own Apple Park visitor center in Cupertino.

ClubHouse Offering Music Audio Listening Without Any Music Licensing

ClubHouse has been a popular audio app for some time now, but it seems like they now have audio listening rooms (Pandora style).

It seems like ClubHouse has forgot one huge downside to this and that’s the fact that they don’t actually have any music licensing to be able to offer such a service.

I wonder whether this is part of the ClubHouse strategy or whether this has just become something that is happening inside their app without their control …. I’m not too sure. However, it won’t take very long for music PRO societies to notice this and come calling for an appropriate license.

Fractal Raises $35 million for Blockchain Gaming Assets – Justin Kan is back!

Moving assets from game to game is going to be a game changer. However, it really requires the game companies and studios to work together – which they haven’t exactly done well in the past.

Fractal is a very interesting company that can hopefully bring more companies together. I could see this working very well on Steam or by a very large company like Activision Blizzard.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2022/04/04/blockchain-assets-are-a-new-business-model-for-gaming-says-justin-kan.html

Kokkinakis and Kyrgios – Bring the Fun and the Fans to the Doubles Courts!

It is great to see Kokkinakis and Kyrgios playing more and more doubles events on the tour. They bring the fun to the doubles court – when then in turn brings a lot more spectators compared to numbers they would normally get on the outside courts for a first round doubles match.

I hope this continues and drives more singles players onto the doubles court.

Coinbase Very Close to Acquiring Brazils Largest Crypto Exchange – Mercado Bitcoin

Report came out today that Coinbase (COIN) is currently in talks to acquire 2TMM, owner of Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil’s largest crypto exchange.

Mercado Bitcoin has reached 3.2 million customers in 2021, of which 1.1 million were added last year, with a trading volume of $7.1 billion in 2021.

Why it matters:

This gives Coinbase a very strong position in a market in which they have been struggling to gain traction. Brazil and South America overall is going to be a very important market in future for cyptocurrencies.

Katie Haun – Launches Haun Ventures with $1.5 billion in Capital to Invest in Crypto Startups

Katie Haun (who was previously at a16z as the head of their crypto investments division) has started her own venture firm focused on the crypto market and has raised $1.5 billion.

The capital, the largest ever for a solo female founder-led venture, is split across two funds, with the first $500M tranche set out for backing early-stage startups. The remaining $1B “accelerator” fund will focus on late-stage well-established firms across Web3.

SWIFT Network Restrictions Could Cripple Russia in the Ukraine War

I came across this information about SWIFT network posted the other day. This could have a very big impact on the Russian and Ukraine war and instead of trying to put it in my own words I thought I would repost it.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western governments have dropped heavy sanctions on Russian banks, companies, and elites—including President Vladimir Putin himself.

But they’ve yet to move forward with what’s been called the “nuclear option”: banning Russia from using SWIFT.

What is SWIFT?

Belgium’s Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) runs a messaging service that facilitates transactions across 11,000+ financial institutions globally. Think of it as the “Gmail of global banking.”

Entities in every country except North Korea use SWIFT to shuffle trillions of dollars’ worth of funds across borders. And Russia is a SWIFT power user—as a major supplier of energy and other goods, it ranks sixth globally for payment messages sent on SWIFT. So if Russia were cut off from SWIFT, “the nation would essentially be severed from much of the global financial system,” the NYT wrote.

Thing is, not everyone’s prepared for that

While the UK and Ukraine are trying to boot Russia from the global group chat, the US and some EU nations are a little more hesitant. Here’s why:

  1. They’re not ready to go full James Franco in 127 Hours. Their citizens still use Russian energy to keep the lights on, so shutting down Russia’s Gmail account would essentially force financial communications onto a janky platform like 1990s-era AOL, resulting in a colossal headache for everyone involved.
  2. Another worry for the US is how blocking Russia from SWIFT would impact the dominance of the US dollar in the longer term. The US enjoys many benefits from the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, and US officials are concerned that booting Russia from SWIFT would spur Moscow to join up with Beijing and develop alternative payment systems (on the blockchain, for instance) that undermine the dollar.

Of course, workarounds to SWIFT already exist, which is another reason why some sanctions experts say that blocking SWIFT access is an overrated tool for punishing Russia. You could do it, but you might be creating more problems for yourself in the process.