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SpinMedia restructures to pay off creditors

By | Published on Wednesday 5 February 2014

SpinMedia

Music and entertainment blogging firm SpinMedia has been sold to a new company called SpinMedia Group, as part of a process known in US law as an “assignment for the benefit of creditors”. Essentially, the company has put itself into something like liquidation and a number of its previous investors have clubbed together to buy it back. The purpose of this is to raise funds – in this case $10 million – to pay off existing creditors.

CEO Dale Strang told Re/code that M/C Partners, Focus Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners, which were all investors in the previous company, are still on board, and another venture capital firm, TDF Ventures, had also joined. However, Redpoint Ventures, which invested $15 million in the company last year, has decided to cut its losses and get out.

Exactly what this means for SpinMedia long term isn’t clear. Strange said that the company has “learned quite a bit over the past few months”, but added that there weren’t currently any plans to make significant cuts to the approximately 170 strong workforce.

That said, one of the company’s blogs, video site Videogum (a sister site to music blog Stereogum) was not transferred to the new company, and now its future is uncertain.

Senior Editor Kelly Conaboy announced on the site earlier this week that he will be leaving his role on Friday, adding: “As for what will happen after Friday, I don’t know, and I don’t care. [Founder] Scott Lapatine is assessing options for keeping Videogum online in some form. We’ll see. But for now, all we can do is try to keep our chins up, be grateful for the many, many blogging years we’ve been given here, and enjoy our last week together”.

As previously reported, originally known as Buzzmedia, the company rebranded as SpinMedia in March last year after purchasing iconic American music magazine SPIN in July 2012 (and promptly shutting down its print operation). In April 2013, the company also bought another American music mag, R&B and hip hop title Vibe, which does continue to operate a bi-monthly print edition.



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