SFX Entertainment Files For IPO, D&M Sells Allen & Heath

Finally, I’ll be able to call my broker and tell him to invest in dance music.

[...] In a quick bit of industry financial news, two major stories that are of significant interest to the DJ sphere have come across the DJTT editorial desk in the last few days. First up, SFX Entertainment just finished filing with the US Securities… Read more [...]

I wonder if A&H build quality can eventually go back to where it once was with this change. The sound is still wonderful, but ever since manufacturing moved from UK to China, the issues with their DJ gear have been pretty vast. I’ve jumped ship to Pioneer for a while after going through 3 bad Xones in 1 year but can’t wait to someday be back!

I predict that the only people who will make money off this IPO are the SFX company founders. It smells to me like the dot com days, when Money Dudes bundled up a bunch of small companies, took the lot public, retired, let go of the reins, and then shorted the stock as the company sputtered. While 2.8 million festivalgoers is a lot of people, in terms of global reach, 2.8 million is not very large at all. SFX’s closest comparable is probably LiveNation, and as of today, LiveNation’s reach is almost 20 times the size with a reach of 60 million. Based on its numbers (http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/stock-price/?symbol=LYV) LiveNation is currently losing $157 million a year, and based on it’s forward P-to-E it looks to me as if it’s expected to continue losing money for a quite some time.

I mean the royal “Money Dudes,” not any company or individual named Money Dudes.

I wonder how this will affect pricing, R+D, and licensing for parts between AH and Denon.

what gear will this mean each company will now focus on?

well…

I believe that each of these companies should invest more on their own DJ/Music software and add it to their own products.

I have seem Native Instruments expanding very quickly in the past years and I see the others companies moving very slow which is bad for business. The only major winner here is Native Instrument which is pulling more customers to their products. Innovation is good even though you attract people to them by depending on their own products and that is what Native instrument is doing. They started with an audio interface and Traktor and now they are producing everything. If they continue on this path, In the near future, they will replace Pioneer from the top DJ gears.