On May 24, 2007, Los Angeles-based Buzznet announced a $6 million venture financing led by Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners. The company was not simply cloning MySpace: it was building a music- and pop-culture community where fans, artists and advertisers could meet through photos, videos, journals, groups, polls and artist pages.
What the financing announcement said
TechCrunch reported that Buzznet had closed a $6 million round, with Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners identified as the lead investors. The coverage did not establish a valuation or a precise series designation, so the transaction is best described simply as a new venture round. TechCrunch’s May 24, 2007 report also described Buzznet as a Hollywood-area company claiming more than 6 million users.
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That user figure was a company-reported number, not an audited count of monthly active people or paying customers. The investment therefore reflected investors’ expectations about growth and monetization as much as verified financial performance.
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What Buzznet actually was
Buzznet combined several products that were usually associated with separate services:
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- Photo sharing: Fans could upload and browse concert, artist and backstage images.
- Journals and blogs: Members could publish personal posts about music and pop culture.
- Video: User-created clips added a moving-image layer to the community.
- Groups and polls: Interest-based features gave fans ways to organize and debate.
- Artist and band pages: Musicians and their audiences could gather in dedicated communities.
TechCrunch compared the service with elements of Flickr and MySpace, but the comparison is more useful as a description of its feature mix than as a claim that Buzznet was interchangeable with either platform. Its organizing principle was fandom, particularly around alternative, indie and pop-punk music, rather than a general-purpose network for every kind of relationship.
Why a music niche looked investable
A stronger reason to return
Music releases, tours and celebrity news create recurring events. A fan might return to see new concert photos, read an artist post, watch a clip or discuss a band with other enthusiasts. That gave Buzznet a more specific habit loop than a blank social profile did.
A ready-made community of participants
The service could involve several groups at once: fans supplied content and conversation; artists supplied attention and access; labels and promoters supplied events; and advertisers sought concentrated reach among young music listeners. Artist pages could therefore function as both community hubs and marketing channels.
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A differentiated pitch in a crowded market
In 2007, investors were funding many social products that competed for overlapping users. A vertical strategy offered a clearer answer to “who is this for?” Buzznet’s answer was music and pop culture, with the possibility of expanding outward after establishing that identity.
What evidence of traction existed?
Contemporaneous reports cited several different indicators. They should not be added together because each measures something different.
| Indicator | What was reported | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Registered users | More than 6 million, according to Buzznet | A company claim; not equivalent to active users or revenue. |
| Hitwise ranking | No. 17 among social-networking sites in March 2007 | A period-specific traffic ranking, not a user count. |
| Alexa and Compete | TechCrunch said Alexa placed Buzznet among the top 1,000 sites and Compete among the top 500 | Third-party web rankings using their own methodologies. |
| Entertainment-media growth | The Los Angeles Business Journal reported Buzznet as the third-fastest-growing site in that category in July 2007, behind YouTube and MySpace | A category growth comparison for a particular period. |
| Artist-page activity | A Honda-sponsored Fall Out Boy page reportedly received about 1 million unique visitors | A page-level partnership result reported by the newspaper, not proof of company-wide profitability. |
The reported average user age was 16, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal. That is a period-specific reported demographic, not an independently verified description of every Buzznet member.
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How Buzznet intended to make money
Advertising was the clearest documented business model. The company employed a sales team offering banner and text advertising to marketers seeking young music fans. It also promoted branded artist, tour and community pages, which integrated sponsorship into the experience instead of relying only on conventional display inventory.
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What the $6 million was meant to support
Public accounts did not provide a line-by-line spending plan. The defensible interpretation is that the capital supported expansion: growing the audience, enlarging sales and business-development operations, developing artist and brand partnerships, and broadening Buzznet beyond its initial music focus into wider pop culture. A funding database attributed expansion-oriented comments to founder and president Anthony Batt, but the precise allocation of the round was not disclosed.
Who backed the company—and what came before
Redpoint was a major Silicon Valley venture firm that had also invested in MySpace, giving it a direct perspective on social-network economics. Santa Monica-based Anthem Venture Partners was an earlier Buzznet backer as well as a participant in the 2007 financing.
The round should not be called Buzznet’s first financing. A secondary funding record lists a reported $1 million financing involving Anthem and MK Capital on June 30, 2006, and another record lists an undisclosed Redpoint financing in December 2006. Those entries are useful historical clues, but they are less authoritative than the contemporaneous financing announcement.
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The skeptical framing captured a real problem: Buzznet competed for attention and advertising budgets against MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and other rapidly growing services. A niche could attract passionate users, but a larger network could copy features, offer a broader social graph and make it easier for artists or fans to consolidate elsewhere.
Buzznet also faced structural risks:
- Youth monetization: A highly engaged teenage audience may have limited direct purchasing power.
- Cultural dependence: Traffic could follow artist popularity, release cycles and changing tastes.
- Rights and moderation: Fan-uploaded photos, videos and music-related material created copyright, safety and moderation obligations.
- Metric uncertainty: Registered accounts and traffic rankings could overstate the size of the regularly active audience.
- Platform dependence: Artists and fans could migrate to services with larger, more general-purpose networks.
Those risks did not make the strategy irrational. They defined the test investors were funding: whether concentrated fandom could produce durable engagement and better advertising economics than a generic social site.
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Timeline: from music community to broader media company
Sources disagree about Buzznet’s founding year. TechCrunch described the company as established in 2003, while an ITmedia report said it was founded in 2005. The discrepancy should be preserved rather than resolved without evidence.
- June 2006: A secondary database records a reported $1 million financing involving Anthem Venture Partners and MK Capital.
- December 2006: A secondary database lists an undisclosed financing involving Redpoint.
- April 2007: Later historical summaries identify Buzznet as the official online community for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
- May 24, 2007: Buzznet announced the $6 million round.
- July 2007: Tyler Goldman was identified as the company’s new CEO as it expanded advertising and audience operations.
- March–April 2008: Reports described a financing of as much as $25 million and Buzznet’s acquisition of Stereogum, with Interscope/Universal involvement reported in the broader expansion.
- March 19, 2009: Buzznet was reported to have raised $12.5 million and changed its corporate name to Buzz Media.
The later financing and acquisitions matter because they show the 2007 round as part of an expansion strategy, not an isolated bet on a photo-sharing site. They do not change the amount or date of the May 2007 financing.
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Bottom-line assessment
Buzznet’s differentiation was credible: it used music fandom as a focused social identity, combined user-generated media with artist participation, and sold advertisers access to that concentrated audience. The $6 million round signaled that Redpoint and Anthem believed this niche could scale. The unresolved question was whether Buzznet could turn strong fan engagement into durable independent reach and profitable advertising while larger platforms competed for the same people, artists and brands.
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