BuzzNet Gets Up to $25 Million + Stereogum

I began this post months ago and never posted it. Now it’s all but confirmed that BuzzNet FULLY owns Stereogum and on top of that Just received up to $25 million in funding. This according to Rafat Ali of paidcontent who is sitting right next to me at the Community Next conference.

We have confirmed through sources that Buzznet now fully owns Stereogum. Not sure how this plays into the new funding, but the financing may be used in making some other music and entertainment related content acquisitions and possibly rollups, our sources say.

UPDATE: Mashable is reporting that Buzznet has also acquired QLoud, the Steve Case-backed music network seen on Facebook and elsewhere.

Anyone who is a fan of indie-music blog Stereogum, like myself, understands the value of such a blog. You visit Stereogum regularly. It lives in my RSS newsreader, and STILL I find myself clicking out to the Web site on a regular basis to listen to clips, etc. It’s not merely an mp3-blog, nor a music gossip/news site, and it’s certainly not a multi-thick-rimmed-specs-authored review site like Pitchfork.

So why would the three owners of Stereogum, including founder and former VH1 Web producer Scott Lapatine, flip the company to “social media” site BuzzNet?

All indie-cred nonsense aside, it just seems baffling that Lapatine and his two investors would hand over ownership of their zero-overhead site (valued at $5 million) to BuzzNet. BuzzNet‘s traffic has clearly ramped up traffic in the past year and last May picked up $6M in funding on reports of 8 million active users,