James Governor's Monkchips

And then IBM

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will be in the music download business when it buys Amazon, which is I guess why the idea will never happen. On reflection eMusic and Last.FM would probably cost upwards of $2bn so I don’t think Jeff or his shareholders would be too keen either. What can I say? I am an eMusic fanboy and I am not going to buy from Amazon without a damn good reason to do so. Thinking like a person not an investor.

3 comments

  1. $2 billion for eMusic and Last.fm? I don’t know about Last.fm, but IIRC Hypebot was mentioning an asking price for eMusic of about $100M. eMusic has approx. 300K subscribers, and average revenue per subscriber per month is approx. $15, so eMusic’s annual revenue is on the order of $50M, and the rumored asking price is about 2x revenues.

    eMusic is perceived as being threatened by Amazon, and Last.fm is presumably perceived as threatened by proposed increases in net radio royalties. I suspect that IBM, Google, or whomever could pick up both eMusic and Last.fm for considerably less than $2 billion.

  2. the valuation rumours in London about Last.FM are pretty absurd. i have seen 500m sterling mentioned, and that’s a firm without revenues, and i figured eMusic must be worth a lot as number two to iTunes.

  3. Again, I can’t speak to Last.fm, but eMusic’s subscriber growth has been good but not YouTube-like explosive, and that sets a limit on its future earnings and hence valuation. As for being number two to the iTunes Store, s I said the general perception seems to be that that position is somewhat in doubt as Amazon enters the market.

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