The Times of Israel carries a bold leading sentence about the acquisition of eMusic by an Israeli firm, TriPlay:
Overnight, an Israeli cloud-based music access platform start-up has become one of the world’s largest digital music services. Comparable in size to iTunes and Google Play Music, eMusic was bought by Ramat Gan-based TriPlay for an undisclosed amount in cash and stock.
It’s hard to find concrete numbers, but given recent stats distributed about Apple Music and Spotify, and with an upcoming IPO for Deezer, a French competitor to Spotify, as well as the success of YouTube, Google Play and Pandora, I would argue that eMusic won’t really pose a real threat to the incumbents. It will likely continue to attract a devoted indie fanbase, but I just can’t see if overtaking better-capitalized competitors. I wouldn’t be surprised if the acquisition was for some sort of intellectual property or distribution rights that eMusic held.
What I think is more interesting than the supposed threat eMusic poses is that an Israeli tech/media firm bought an American one, and not – as with Google and Waze or Apple and Anobit – the other way around.
