Universal, Warner, Sony Music Invest $9 Million In Shazam Ahead Of IPO
Shazam has landed investments from the world's 3 largest label groups, Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music have each invested $3 million in the music and audio identification app. Shazam is currently valued at $500 million, making their collective stake less than 2%.
Music tech investments by the big three music groups, who are hoping to both diversify their portfolios and have more control over their digital destinies. Spotify and Beats are both partly funded by label investments. This deal makes sense both because the labels see Shazam as a marketing and consumer data partner; and because the London based company is headed for a profitable IPO.
In February, Warner Music Group and Shazam formed a strategic alliance to discover new acts and sign them to a Shazam branded label. The Shazam imprint will identify unsigned artists by combining traditional A&R with with the music ID app's massive fan activity data. The partnership will also market existing WMG artists.
All of the shares were purchased from a single third-party investor, according the Wall Street Journal which first reported the deal. Shazam has 450 million users worldwide and 90 million monthly active users.
They have invested in most glorified PIMP of music.
Hopefully this small but coordinated investment will bring fruitful conversion of Shazam and other music ID services to cash registers of the industry.
As is Shazam and friends is a trespassing private property sorting thru someone’s goods and passing them at the click of the button to strangers (9 out 10 cases) It is criminal activity by any social standard in last 2000 years. Change in fair use doctrine would stop this type of activity and convert all ID guys to mandatory cash registers of the industry. Next day 100,000+ Radio stations, including Pandora and XM could become music stores contributing to $new $100 billion dollar music industry.
Simple and obvious – let’s do it!