MP3.com, the website that allows consumers to search, sample and download music free of charge, raised $344.4 million in an initial stock sale yesterday.
The San Diego-based company sold 12.3 million shares at $28 each. The shares were priced $2 above the top of the $24-to-$26 range set by Credit Suisse First Boston Corp., which handled the transaction.
CS First Boston raised the range to $24 to $26 from $16 to $18 earlier yesterday.
When MP3.com announced its intentions to go public in May, shares were priced at $9 to $11 each.
The sale represented an 18 percent stake and gave the company a market value of $1.86 billion.
And that is music to investor’s ears – especially Bernard Arnault, the site’s leading shareholder.
The chairman of French luxury goods maker LVMH scooped up almost 27 percent of MP3.com’s shares last week. Groupe Arnault of France, the fashion titan’s private holding company that controls the publicly traded LVMH, has been on an Internet shopping spree recently, buying up stakes in several Web ventures.
The company said it plans on using most of the money raised in the IPO for general corporate purposes.
MP3.com contains over 100,000 songs from over 18,000 artists – one of the largest collections of digital music available on the Internet.
MP3.com will trade under the symbol MPPP on the Nasdaq stock market.