Advertisers foot the bill for your music obsession; bands still get paid. Win-win?
Hey you. Yes, you sitting in front of your screen reading this. Open question: how do you listen to music online? Are you a regular iTunes buyer? Maybe you've got an eMusic subscription (remember those?). Do you use streaming tools like MySpace Music or We Are Hunted (http://wearehunted.com) to get your daily music fix? Or are you intimately acquainted with the dark arts of The Pirate Bay and LimeWire, and the associated networks and software that offer somethin'-for-nothin'?
If you use the latter method, a new online music service is fighting for your attention. It's called Guvera, it's run by a team based on Queensland’s Gold Coast, and their message is clear, as evidenced in the above banner: fuck pirates.
Guvera offers guilt-free, high-quality (256kbps) MP3 downloads at zero cost to you. It's just like your profitable relationship with decentralised torrent and peer-to-peer networks, except that by using Guvera, the artists get paid, and are more likely to afford to keep making the music that you love. Awesome.
The Vine spoke with Guvera CEO Claes Loburg for the inside word ahead of its public launch next Tuesday, March 30.
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Hey Claes. Can you summarise what Guvera's all about?
Here's the gist of it: advertisers paying for downloads. There's nothing new about the idea of advertisers actually paying for content. That's how we've been receiving TV for free for all these years. What's wrong with television at the moment, is that advertising is actually starting to lose value year, on year. People have got the power to click past it, sort of get around the advertising. That's a reflection of all advertising across the board.
Now that the people are in control, Guvera's business model is a reversal of the advertising process. Instead of advertisers being the annoying thing they used to be years ago, now what they can be is actually a channel that people will want to go to, to get content. It's trying to change the value proposition that looks at the ads as something that disrupts us, but as something that we go to, to get great content. It actually pays the artists for the content they’ve created, and the people still get it for free.
Why should the average Vine reader and digital music consumer give Guvera a chance?
Realistically, the person that we're targeting is the person that's currently getting it illegally. So, the people that are on iTunes at the moment and downloading the songs… the first thing is that Guvera is not a streaming service, so we're not one of the other different clients that exist that you can jump onto and create your own playlists, and listen to the music.
What we are is we're a client where you can go and get your music downloaded and stick onto your iPod and then do your own playlist and do whatever you want with it. Why we're asking you to give Guvera a go is if you're currently stealing the content from LimeWire, or BitTorrent, or any of the places that go to for peer-to-peer content: nobody is getting paid for that. Yes, you're getting the content for free. Yes, it's easy. Guvera provides an opportunity to get it free, and the artist gets paid.
We get the argument all the time: "why wouldn't people just continue using [services like Limewire and BitTorrent] because those services are so easy, the Peer-to-Peer sort of things that I can just log on, swipe 200 songs that I want, push download and go away and get a cup of coffee, back and it's all done". The reality is those people that want to use those, they can still use those services. What we're trying to do is just implement something that is trying to create an option for the music industry to try and monetise the free stuff that everybody's already getting, by getting advertisers to pay for it.
How do the artists get paid?
We pay the labels for each download, in exactly the same way as iTunes pays the labels for each download. It's a pretty similar deal. It's basically a transaction for the downloaded file, as if the file was purchased through one of those services. You just get the raw MP3 file that you can do whatever you want with. The transaction from the music label to us is exactly the same as if the end user actually bought it and somebody else paid the bill.
Right on, Claes.
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Guvera has been in private beta for several months, and has clocked up some 27,000 users. It’ll be available to the public on Tuesday, March 30 featuring a catalogue supported by major labels EMI and Universal, as well Shock Records, Australia’s biggest indie label.
You can pre-register at
Guvera.com to get a piece of the free (and guilt-free) download action.