Investors Are Drawn Anew to Digital Music

By BEN SISARIO
NYT

Since it emerged in the 1990s, digital music has been hugely popular with fans, but for online music companies and their investors it has almost never been profitable.

And yet the money has again started pouring in.

Pandora, the popular Internet radio service, filed for an initial public offering in February that would raise $100 million. Spotify, a highly lauded European service, is reportedly raising $100 million from private equity firms to help it come to the United States.

And those are just the big fish. Since the end of last year, at least $57 million in venture capital has gone to digital music start-ups, ending a recent financing drought and setting up an array of young companies like Rdio, SoundCloud and RootMusic in an already crowded marketplace.

(More here.)