January 21, 2008

We7 Takes $6 Million Series A

Duncan Riley

9 comments »

we7.jpgAd supported music download service We7 has taken $6 million Series A is a round led by musician Peter Gabriel and Spark Ventures, with Eden Ventures also participating.

Oxford, UK based We7 offers free music and video for download that is ad supported. The company notes that their model is “artist friendly at all times,” by making sure that rights owners get paid and artists maintain control over their Intellectual Property

The services currently have just shy of 100,000 users who have downloaded over 1 million tracks.

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  1. Akkdio

    can you let them know that when you go to read the terms and conditions before registering that they wipe our your form data… Geez.

  2. Alex

    Would love to see the DCF model that Peter Gabriel put together to value the company. That’s like me saying that I’m writing the lyrics and playing the Flying V with George Michael.

  3. Ben Strackany

    Interesting. Shame it’s only a 50/50 profit split, though …

  4. Steve Purdham

    Hi Guys,
    I am the CEO of We7 just jumping in to answer some of teh questions.
    Akkdio - Told the tech team hopefully they will sort.

    Alex - Not sure your point drop me an email if you want to understand where we are coming from

    Ben - We have to start somewhere to make the model work, what I am convinced of is that it will take awhile for the real ad funded models to be established so this will change going forward.

  5. Chad Meyer

    Sorry dude - this is just too complicated and burdensome. I don’t have the time to manage this stuff. Just want to download free and legally and be done. I am all for artist friendly, but how about user friendly.

  6. Steve Purdham

    Hi Chad
    Understand whre you are coming from and actually there are two things - Getting the music with the ads is actually very easy, in fact to easy you can download great tracks and albums in probably the fastest and most efficient way than any others site.

    The complicated bit (and I agree with you ) is the dropping of the dropping of the ads and that is teh downside of non-DRM files. We are looking at this tomake it more automated and streamline, in teh meantime if you keep teh ads the system is very easy.
    Steve
    CEO We7

  7. Chris McConnell

    For an interview with We7 CEO Steve Purdham, head over to http://www.cmcconnell.com.

  8. David Muir

    What’s to complain about? This is a brilliant idea and I hope they can make it work. I can live with the ads for 28 days and then re-downloading - where’s the complication? Slightly time consuming but otherwise no problem. And if I have to choose between downloading something twice and paying £10ish for a CD… I know which one I prefer. Now… if only there was some stuff from Peter Gabriel himself. :-)