Showtime for Robert Sillerman with $260m IPO of SFX Entertainment Media impresario, Robert Sillerman, who once owned the Elvis Presley estate and the American Idol television show, is getting hip with the kids after decades in mainstream music and entertainment promotion. With music festivals boasting such names as Tomorrowland and Electric Zoo, Mr Sillerman is making his return to Wall Street by raising $260m in the initial public offering of concert promoter SFX Entertainment. But he does not appear to be in tune with investors, who sent SFX's shares down by as much as 17 per cent on Wednesday, ranking it among the worst first-days for a US IPO this year. They may have been sceptical because SFX's vision has yet to materialise in profits. The company lost $43.5m in the first six months of the year, widening from a $3m loss a year earlier. Mr Sillerman, who is chairman and chief executive of the group, intends to use the proceeds to pay for recent acquisitions of festivals, concerts and even a leading electronic dance music website called Beatport, while also making further ones. "I hope we will be a quite active acquirer in the future," he said Wednesday. In particular, SFX believes it can exploit a growing US market for the genre, which has only recently swept into the mainstream there. SFX bills itself as the largest producer of concerts and digital content focused exclusively on the $4.5bn market for electronic dance music. Electronic music for the millennials is to entertainment as texting is to communication. It's ubiquitous," Mr Sillerman recently told potential investors. Electronic dance music stars such as Skrillex, deadmau5, Avicii and Swedish House Mafia have driven sales from live events and digital streaming, but overall the genre has yet to achieve the general popularity of other music categories such as rock and pop. So far it looks like this is how the millennial generation consumes live events, in the form of a festival rather than going to a live concert or watching MTV Rich Tullo, director of research at Albert Fried & Company The 65-year-old Mr Sillerman, however, has a record of savvy investments in music and promotional ventures, most notably with the first incarnation of SFX. The company, which derived its name from Mr Sillerman's - his middle initials are "FX" - owned a collection of radio stations and was sold to Hicks Muse in 1997 for $2.1bn. Mr Sillerman earned a reported $219m for the deal. He then began acquiring entertainment venues and music and sports agencies in a new company - SFX Entertainment - which he sold to Clear Channel for $4bn. In the years that followed his CKX group - the CK stood for "Content is King" - bought the rights to the hit show American Idol , through his 2005 acquisition of Simon Fuller's 19 Entertainment. CKX also acquired the Elvis Presley estate, including the Graceland mansion. Apollo Global Management, Leon Black's private equity group, subsequently bought CKX, and is now in the process of selling the Elvis estate. Mr Sillerman, who has a fondness for ice cream and outrageous outfits, struggled to make the same mark in real estate that he did in music. He aimed to build an Elvis-themed Las Vegas hotel and casino and borrowed $475m to buy a parcel of land in the city but the plans failed. He invested $180m of his own money into an ambitious luxury real estate development in Anguilla in the Caribbean but that project also ran into trouble. "I'm not very knowledgeable about real estate," he told Bloomberg in 2009. I think I've demonstrated that to the world. Some investors, however, have already taken note of Mr Sillerman's push into electronic dance music, with Och-Ziff Capital, a large hedge fund, and WPP, the advertising company run by Sir Martin Sorrell, each owning stakes in SFX. To pull off his latest gambit, Mr Sillerman is relying on some old hands. Among them, Joseph Rascoff, the former business manager of the Rolling Stones, who says electronic dance music is feeding a desire among so-called millennials - those born between the early 1980s and 2000 - to be a part of the shows they attend. Highlighting its sales potential, SFX has said that the Tomorrowland festival in Belgium sold 180,000 tickets in one second this year as 4.7m people queued online for the annual event. In response to US interest, the company put on TomorrowWorld outside Atlanta, Georgia, last month, attracting 120,000 attendees. But SFX has also warned that its business may be harmed by fatalities at its events, such as the two suspected drug-related deaths that occurred at this year's Electric Zoo festival in New York, which led to the cancellation of the third day of the event. Rich Tullo, director of research at Albert Fried & Company says: "So far it looks like this is how the millennial generation consumes live events, in the form of a festival rather than going to a live concert or watching MTV." But for Mr Sillerman and SFX, he says: "The open question is whether the festival business is durable or if it is just a consumer fad."