guy oseary
Collaborative Fund and Imaginary Ventures, with additional investment from BMG parent company Bertelsmann and superstar manager Guy Oseary, have led a multimillion fundraising round for [cafeteria], a new market research app that pays teens to opine on what they want from top U.S. brands.
Co-founded and led by Rishi Malhotra — known for creating India’s top streaming platform JioSaavn — Malhotra says [cafeteria] gleans marketing insights from a critical mass of teenagers through open-ended, one-on-one conversations that could start with questions like, “What do you wish McDonald’s had on its menu?” or “What do you think of this Billie Eilish song?”
Major brands can use the conversations with teens to glean insights — for example, teens on average say they are willing to pay $314 to see their favorite artist live — or identify trends before they’re trendy — like Canadian singer songwriter Tate McCrae, which teens were talking about in February, says Malhotra, whose co-founders on the app are former Luminary execs Mark Silverstein and Leeann Sheely.
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“Once something is already a trend, it might be a little late. But when something is pre-trend it’s very actionable,” says Malhotra, who came up with the idea for [cafeteria] by observing his own teenage children. “There is also future testing (applications), like, what do you think about this record?”
[cafeteria] soft-launched three months ago and now has a few thousand users in 39 U.S. states and 60 cities. On average they spend five minutes at [cafeteria]’s virtual “tables” — chat rooms where they answer artificial intelligence-generated questions either by text or voice note. While teens do earn money for providing feedback, Malhotra said they do not expect this to be a major money-making endeavor for its participants.
The seed funding round was led by Collaborative Fund, investors in Beyond Meat, Lyft and Sweetgreen, and Imaginary Ventures, investors in Skims, Glossier and Daily Harvest, followed by Oseary, an early investor in Peloton who leads the venture capital firm Sound Ventures with Ashton Kutcher, which has stakes in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Pinterest, Robinhood, and others.
The [cafeteria] app
[cafeteria]
Madonna is planning a massive 40th anniversary tour later this year with her longtime concert promotion partner and producer Live Nation and music manager Guy Oseary, sources tell Billboard.
The 64-year-old pop icon will perform music from her entire catalogue, dating back to her 1983 self-titled debut album through her most recent studio album, 2019’s Madame X. The world tour will be Madonna’s first ever career retrospective, featuring a compilation of her biggest hits across four decades of music and will reportedly include a multi-night run at the O2 in London.
“It’s going to be the biggest tour she’s ever done,” one executive familiar with her plans tells Billboard. The tour will include both stadium and arena dates, the source says, and include over-the-top production that delivers both “Material Girl” kitsch and occasionally outrageous sex appeal with plenty of show-stopping moments made for social media.
Billboard has also learned that Oseary will continue to serve on Madonna’s management team, despite stepping down from his role at mega-management collective Maverick in 2020 and splitting with longtime clients U2 in 2022.
The tour buzz comes just months after the “Hey You” singer released her career-spanning compilation album Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, spanning her entire dance club career, featuring remixes by top producers including 20 rare recordings officially released for the first time. In 2021, Madonna signed a deal with Warner Music Group for an “extensive, multi-year series of catalog releases that will revisit the groundbreaking music that made her an international icon.”
Madonna last toured in 2019 and early 2020 on her Madame X tour, a theater run that was struggled through production delays and Madonna’s recurring hip and knee injuries. While the Madame X tour earned strong critical reviews in the press, its habitually late start time often angered ticket holders and prompted two class actions lawsuits from fans.
When it comes to choosing her nightly set list for this new tour, Madonna will have no shortage of songs to choose from with 57 titles charting on the Billboard Hot 100, 38 top 10 hits and 12 No. 1s, including 1990’s “Vogue,” and 2000’s “Music,” released a decade apart and each spending 24 weeks on the Hot 100. Madonna’s “Borderline” from 1984 spent 30 weeks on the Hot 100. She followed that impressive feat a decade later with the ballad “Take a Bow,” which held the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100 for seven weeks.
Madonna’s 2008-2009 Sticky and Sweet Tour is the highest grossing tour by a female artist ever, according to Billboard Boxscore, netting $407 million. Her most recent Madame X theater run grossed $36.4 million with 124,655 ticket sold.
Reps for Madonna could not be reached for comment at time of publishing.
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