Ad 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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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.
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.
Interesting. Shame it’s only a 50/50 profit split, though …
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.
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.
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
For an interview with We7 CEO Steve Purdham, head over to http://www.cmcconnell.com.
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.