MP3.com goes public: Public goes Crazy

mykey2k writes "Anyone remember this story back in March? Well, MP3.com went public Wednesday. There's a story here, which seems to have some details. " It opened at $28, and went over $100 a share before leveling out the in the $60s.

Only direct buyers did good

In case you're wondering, the only way you could have made money off of this is if you were one of the original IPO share purchasers, not buying the stock on the open market. (It does say they set aside shares for bands that have songs on their site.) The rest of us would have just lost money on it.

Sheesh, ~$4 billion market-cap for that company.

Why the stock got bid up

Wired news had an interesting blurb on this, pointing out that 80+% of MP3.COM's revenues come from on-site advertising, and they lost a few mil last year, but due to the current MP3 hype, and the fact that apparently a lot of people think they own the MP3 technology (!) the company got bid up into the billions.

Greater fool theory, indeed!

We need a "market" icon

I will probably catch some flames for this, but I'm not happy with the number of stock-related posts over the last few weeks. So-and-so is IPOing, so-and-so might be IPOing, so-and-so's shares went way up and levelled off, etc. As an anymous poster said earlier, this is getting to be "news for daytraders, stocks that matter."

I don't really care about any of this. I'm not so egotistical as to think that my opinions should change slashdot, but I would greatly appreciate it if a new "market" catagory could be created so I could have an easier time filtering this stuff out.

Thanks,
-OT

MP3.com's stock is high because..

MP3.com's stock is so high because people are
buying into the idea of MP3s with
MP3.com, not any profitability, etc.

You make a bet with MP3.com that it will become
the dissemination spot for MP3s in the
next few years, and that owning the online
MP3 market is worth something.

That's the reason it's bid into the billions;
people are buying a chance at ownership of
all online MP3 distribution.

If this doesn't make sense to you, then amazon.com
stock prices probably don't either, for the
same reason -- people are buying the risky
chance that amazon.com will become the online
clearing house for many goods.

Note that amazon.com is down today on their
earnings reports, which are not substantially
lower than analysts expected. What's lower
is the volume growth in revenue -- the market
is upset that amazon is not growing quickly.
They're perfectly happy to fund a cash-loss
business scheme at this point, as evidenced
by amazon.com's market-cap. They're not pleased
that amazon.com's growth is slowing.

It will be the same story with RedHat --
the market will be buying "Linux" by buying
redhat. Expect it to be huge.

Incidentally, I did get in on the MP3 IPO.
Tripled my money in 2 hours. I will do the
same for RedHat if I can get any shares.