From techcrunch – VC injection is slowing down.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/20/vc-deals-in-charts-q1-2008%e2%80%94welcome-to-the-slowdown/
It’s not quite as drastic as the crash of the original dotcom boom, but then again we haven’t really seen much in the way of dotcom IPO’s – most of the high profile stories have been about acquisitions – myspace, youtube, bebo (WTF were AOL thinking?), last.fm, photobucket etc etc
Facebook is the only big name out there that’s talking about the possibility of an IPO
So what’s going to happen now? Well startups can no longer rely on VC’s to keep them afloat while they grow market share, everyone is gong to have to focus on exit strategy.
Looking at the list of music sites in play there are a few which are clearly going to have their work cut out for them
imeem is the biggest site, with the most visitors, but of all the top sites it’s going to have the biggest outlays…. except perhaps for myspace music, which will be a high profile challenge to their core service. It also can’t help that bloggers are rallying like a cult around muxtape, a vastly inferior (or as the cult indoctrination has it ’simpler’) playlist sharing service. While imeem has the most users by a long way they’ve never managed the kind of explosive viral growth that muxtape is showing. imeem will probably be acquired before another VC injection.
projectplaylist is the next big company in play, but they’re going to have a legal fight if they want to avoid paying the record labels, and the regular content churn will keep driving users away to other sites. They’ll have to start hosting everything themselves if they want to compete with myspace and imeem, which means massive cash injections. That’s not going to happen and over time they will begin to slip from their position.
ilike.com will probably get acquired, they can’t compete with the big names but they complement them nicely.
mog.com doesn’t really seem to do anything well, it might be able to break even if it can hold onto its users.
ok bored…. this seemed more interesting when I started it.
