Music industry watch

Yahoo! buys MusicMatch

Yesterday Yahoo! announced the purchase of MusicMatch for $160M. My first encounter with MusicMatch was back in 1998 when I was still working for Xing, and MusicMatch was still called Bravado or some such name. They wanted to (and did) license the Xing MP3 encoder for use in their new jukebox.

In the process of doing that, Xing and MusicMatch became partners for a while and I got to know Dennis Mudd, the CEO of MusicMatch a bit. I'm glad to see that his determination and hard work paid off so handsomely. The linked article has a cool little quip about Dennis that sums it all up:

Leigh also passed on an anecdote from Musicmatch CEO Dennis Mudd's college days. Mudd "was an MBA student at Wharton. For one of his classes he wrote a business plan to start up a company that would develop a business by selling music over the Internet," Leigh said.

"He was given a grade of B. Although the professor evidently liked some things about the paper, he felt that the idea was not practical."

Congrats to Dennis and his team!

Posted by Mayhem at September 15, 2004 12:21 PM