Onetime Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz is hoping an 18-year-old tech whiz kid will give his growing Internet empire a big boost.
Ovitz has added Dimension Music- a website founded and run by a teenage techie – to his expanding Internet stable.
The former head of Creative Artists Agency was so taken with Angelo Sotira and his website, which offers downloadable music files, that he bought the company, and moved it from New York to his Beverly Hills headquarters – with an office down the hall from his own.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and neither Ovitz nor Peter Levin, who is responsible for Ovitz’ Internet undertakings, would comment on the purchase.
Sotira started his site in 1997 from his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., after he stumbled upon the MP3 technology – which enables the downloading of audio files over the Internet – while surfing the web.
Soon after, Dimension Music became the place to find pirated songs by big-name musicians, and at one point boasted up to 40,000 hits a day from fans hoping to find the latest music for free. Before it was sold to Ovitz in August, Dimension Music reported 1999 revenues of between $90,000 and $100,000.
“I’d been a bratty little 16-year-old, and I didn’t care about the artists or the industry,” Sotira told Seventeen Magazine in its November issue.
“I realized it would be more fun to start helping artists and getting permission to promote them,” he added.
Sotira stopped putting up pirated music and began posting songs from such companies as Disney’s Hollywood Records.
That’s when he caught the eye of Ovitz, who was Disney’s president for 14 months before being axed by Michael Eisner.
“I didn’t know who Michael Ovitz was,” Sotira said.
Ovitz, hoping to rekindle the glory days with his startup Artists Management Group, has been quietly buying up a portfolio of Internet companies – most of them entertainment related.
In June, he bought 51 percent of Scour.Net, a multimedia search engine that allows users to find audio and video clips online. That followed his purchase of a stake in online gaming and music venture GameSpy Industries Inc. and his unveiling of new venture CheckOut.com which combines e-commerce and entertainment.