• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, November 6, 2013

OMG stop everything everyone!  The closest thing you will ever encounter to a demigod in our sublunar realm -- yes, I speak now of Justin Bieber -- is investing in a new social network designed for teenagers, whose online social needs apparently aren’t being met by existing nets.

Details about the new social network, Shots of Me, are scarce: it is the work of a San Francisco mobile gaming company, RockLive, it seems to be centered on “selfies” (those ubiquitous smartphone self portrait shots, for the unversed), it purportedly will address important issues like cyber-bullying somehow, and it is supposed to launch on the Apple App Store sometime this week -- but by far the most salient and reported fact about Shots of Me is the investment by His Bieberness, who has 46.5 million followers on Twitter and can make anything famous by writing its name on a scrap of paper and holding it up to a camera.  

Bieber has invested $1.1 million, or a bit less than half the total $2.7 million invested in Shots of Me to date. The list of other investors includes boxing champ Floyd Mayweather and Tom McInerney, a well-known angel investor.

Musicians seem to have a thing for social networks, which are, after all, ideal platforms for sharing music. In 2012 Lady Gaga launched a social network for her fans, littlemonsters.com, in collaboration with Backplane, a social media start-up that counts Gaga as one of its investors with a 20% stake; subsequent investigations have shown the Gaga-centric social net to be just as weird as you might expect.

More recently Justin Timberlake and several investment partners acquired MySpace, the once-dominant social net toppled by Facebook, and relaunched it in June of this year as a music-focused site that allows fans to get closer to their favorite performers.