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, say 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 private label free music streaming and download services
directly to consumers who interface directly with the brand. Spotify and Pandora, conversely, are &ldquo ;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 all kinds of offers that might appeal to their consumers and give them a lift, including
customized branded “play lists” 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, Fl, Guvera
Founder Claes Loberg, explained that the vision didn’t come overnight and 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 borne out of
that revolutionary concept, and that’s the reason it branded the music service around the namesake communist revolutionary Che Guvera.
“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.”