The Most Important Thing You Will Read All Day. #music. Fascinating Music Industry Stats. Spotify's new Investor Lineup Includes Coca-Cola. According to a report in the New York Times, Spotify’s investors in its fresh $100 million round of funding include Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, and Coca-Cola. Goldman, the storied investment bank, put in $50 million — these numbers could be slightly off, fair warning — Fidelity $15 million, and Coca-Cola $10 million.
The final $25 million came from prior investors, likely putting in more funds to ensure that their stake remains sizable. The Goldman funds put the bank in a prime spot to be the leading investment house to help take Spotify down the road. Why might Coca-Cola invest in Spotify, a music company that feels as far from soft drinks as possible? Key: $10 million is a rounding error to its advertising budget, so the funds will hardly be missed. And, critically, the two companies have worked together in the past: Spotify has just announced more details surrounding its worldwide partnership with Coca Cola. Goldman Sachs: 1.66%Fidelity Investments: 0.5%Coca-Cola: 0.33% Spotify Attracts Investments From Coca-Cola and Fidelity. Coca-Cola is becoming a minority investor in Spotify, as part of a new round of financing that will bring in $100 million and value the streaming music service at about $3 billion.
Spotify has completed the financing round, according to one person with direct knowledge of the deal. Of the $100 million, half is from Goldman Sachs, and Coke is contributing about 10 percent. Another new investor, Fidelity Investments, is also said to be chipping in about 15 percent of the financing round, with the remaining quarter coming from Spotify’s existing investors, according to another person briefed on the deal.
Both people spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal was private. A spokesman for Spotify declined to comment, and representatives at Coca-Cola did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. The deal clarifies Coke’s involvement with Spotify. An investment of $10 million or so would be small for a company like Coca-Cola, which has a market capitalization of $162 billion. Nobody Is Crying For You When You Are Worth Billions. I did a talk with Bill Werde at Billboard's FutureSound conference a few weeks ago. The entire talk is online (in two parts) here.
If you go to 7:45 minutes in on the first video (embedded below) you will get to a conversation about Pandora and Spotify and the royalty negotiations they have with the record labels. The specific issue we discussed was how can you expect the music industry to feel like they need to improve the economics of a relationship that allows a company to be worth billions of dollars. It's a great point and one that came back to me when I read the Airbnb article in the New York Times yesterday. It was this comment by Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association, that struck me: I believe that any company that claims that sort of worth [$2bn] should have the social responsibility to disclose what the laws are in the jurisdiction that they’re in.
And that was part of my point in the Billboard talk. Here's my point. Cultural Technology and the Making of K-Pop. It was five o’clock on a Sunday in May, two hours before showtime, but already thousands of K-pop fans had flooded the concrete playa outside the Honda Center, a large arena in Anaheim, California. Tonight’s performers were among the biggest pop groups in South Korea—SHINee, f(x), Super Junior, EXO, TVXQ!
, and Girls’ Generation. In the United States, Korean pop music exists almost exclusively on YouTube, in videos like “Gangnam Style,” by Park Jae-sang, the rapper known as PSY, which recently went viral. The Honda Center show was a rare chance for K-pop fans to see the “idols,” as the performers are called, in the flesh. K-pop is an East-West mash-up. The performers are mostly Korean, and their mesmerizing synchronized dance moves, accompanied by a complex telegraphy of winks and hand gestures, have an Asian flavor, but the music sounds Western: hip-hop verses, Euro-pop choruses, rapping, and dubstep breaks. No, it was nothing like that. I must have looked skeptical.