This indie music distributor is launching a DIY IPO

Altavoz is a music distribution company for indie artists. And it’s now planning a makeshift IPO.
The company announced two weeks ago a project to take over Max Media Group, a publicly-traded company of which it is both a shareholder and subsidiary.
Earlier this year CEO Nelson Jacobsen, whose company offers “distribution as a service,” realized that “no one is going to give us the money we need” to pursue its cause of helping musicians bring their sounds to market.
Then he noted, “Max Media Group is a Pink Sheet public shell that hasn’t traded or had any activity on it.”

So, he decided to crowdfund his way to an IPO of sorts. Altavoz is seeking to raise $45,000 to purchase a majority of the remaining shares of Max Media Group.
“We wanted to take advantage of the ways that D.C. has implemented crowdfunding,” said Jacobsen. The District has seen a crop of new crowdfunding projects in recent years, with EquityEats and Fundrise respectively pioneering equity and real estate crowdfunding.
If all goes according to plan, once Altavoz takes over Max Media Group, it will trade under a new symbol, AVOZ.
Jacobsen hopes the move will also make the company more appealing to rock stars in the making. As of today, Altavoz is “a Maryland SME corporation, a plain old vanilla company,” he said. “Having ownership of that to a recording artist is not as glamorous as having ownership over anything that’s a public stock.”
Based in Rockville, Altavoz is run by three full-time employees “plus an army of contractors,” Jacobsen said. “I believe that if you own part of our company you’re not going to leave us for Universal.”