Guvera Becomes Capitalist Tool, Uses Brand Dollars To Revolutionize Online Music

by Joe Mandese, Jan 23, 2012, 5:24 PM

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Free, ad-supported, licensed music streaming and download service Guvera Entertainment this morning unveiled My Soundtrack, a new Facebook app enabling brands to “boost their social marketing efforts” by promoting a personalized playlist directly on their Facebook page.

If that sounds a bit like Spotify, it’s not, says Guvera Chief Revenue Officer Scotty Moore, a veteran of mobile and gaming startups, who joined the Guvera team just a couple of months ago.

Guvera is focused on using the impressive music catalogue it has licensed, from labels such as EMI, Universal Music Group and Sony, to be a conduit directly for brands. In effect, he says, brands can use Guvera’s platform to provide private-label free music streaming and download services directly to consumers who interface directly with the brand.

Conversely, Spotify and Pandora are "consumer-focused,” subscription-based models that only give tangential benefits to brands that advertise with them.

In other words, Guvera wants to make the brand the “curator” of licensed music, and merely serves as the middleman between the labels and the users on the brand’s behalf. The model is flexible, he says, and brands can utilize the service to make various offers that might appeal to their consumers, including customized branded “playlists” that embody the essence of the brand.

“People know what brands look like. They even know what some brands smell like. Does anyone know what a brand sounds like?” Moore says, adding yet another sense to brand sensibilities.

During a luncheon presentation at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit in Key Largo, Florida, Guvera founder Claes Loberg explained that the vision was eight years in the making. It started with a summit in the U.K. of big agencies and brand marketing executives discussing how they were going to deal with the erosion of the conventional captive audience advertising model -- and how brand content could be a solution.

Loberg said Guvera was born out of that revolutionary concept. That's why it branded the capitalist music service around the namesake communist revolutionary Che Guevera, albeit ironically.

“We felt we are actually shifting the whole model of advertising,” Loberg said, noting that “in a world where everyone was coming up with different versions of prosecution to get people to stop doing something,” Guvera came up with the idea of turning a negative into a positive -- and a mechanism for paying labels and artists for the rights to stream and download their music via advertising dollars.

The idea, said Loberg, was to “use music as currency to get consumers to do things for a free download.”

Or as one of the performers on a video Loberg showed summit attendees said, “We get paid when you steal our sh*t.”

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1 comment on "Guvera Becomes Capitalist Tool, Uses Brand Dollars To Revolutionize Online Music".

1. Jesus Grana from Independent
   

   commented on: January 24, 2012 at 11:51 a.m.
   Somebody either teach Loberg that it is spelled Guevara or come up with a different story of where the name came from

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