MOG has announced that it received a $2.8M strategic investment from Universal Music Group and The Angels’ Forum. We’ve also heard that Sony BMG was also part of the round, which means two major record labels have come together to invest in the same online music venture.
My Life of Travel started out as a personal side project for Calan Horsman back in 2005, but has demanded more as the site began to grow organically. Nearly three years later, My Life of Travel has gained almost 20,000 users, with tens of thousands of entries created, and half a million images uploaded. As a result, Horsman has needed to put a bit more effort into his growing site, and has relaunched its as an officially public offering today.
Break Media has been at the leading edge of online video entertainment in terms of both content development as well as monetization and producer rewards for a good while now - longer than a lot of the other players that see a lot of press in the Web 2.0 game. They’re leading again, as last week they announced the formation of the Online Video Advertising ROI Council.
ILike is an emerging leader in this competitive but still relatively young marketplace of “music discovery” services that help musicians build fan bases. We’ve been tracking the Seattle, Wash. company for years, and at this point it appears to have become a significant component of how music will be shared in the future. Both new and existing acts are using it to help advertise album releases, and iLike is starting to have a big impact.
Madonna has never failed to reinvent herself with the times, somehow always managing to stay relevant, and her 11th studio album, Hard Candy, seems no different. Showing she is still with the times, you can catch her new album streaming on her MySpace page four days before it’s official release.
Bootstrapped service MyPlayList, the free music/ Flickr mashup service we wrote about earlier this month, is on the market, but with a twist: a majority stake (51%) is being offered free to a good home.
We brought you word a couple of months ago about DivX’s closure of the Stage 6 video portal, which, in all its time of activity, never managed to become a lossless or a profitable platform. According to Martin of gHacks.net, evidently “bandwidth and server costs accumulated to more than a million dollars each month.” It was certainly popular, but it’s financial legitimacy was very much in question, so it ceased to operate.
