Larry Heath talks to Scott Hamilton, newly appointed General Manager of Guvera, an online music and streaming service, about competition, growth and constant challenges faced in the mobile music market.
You’ve come into this position as GM of Guvera quite recently, What’s your background?
I’ve been in this position a week, I came in last Thursday. Prior to this, I’ve been involved in Media for 18 years. Starting out in Publishing, moved across to Cross Media Sales and then onto Digital Space. Along the way setting up a few businesses for Yahoo and during that time gained a lot of experience setting up, working on projects, and cross platforming.
Went over to Yahoo and extended that even more; having the chance to run my own show and set up businesses for BBC Worldwide, which is the commercial arm of the BBC. They sell content, and also monetize news websites and run live events such as Top Gear Live. My role there predominantly was to monetize audience engagement.
Where were you based… London?
Based in North Ryde, I took a business from being not much, to a team of two, than by the time I left a team of around twenty.
During that time we launched the iPad and iPhone apps and saw the growth of mobile… “The Year of the Mobile”. Then last year I was looking around for opportunities just seeing what was going on, being someone who likes a challenge I like to jump in the deep end and just go for it. At the same time the mobile marketplace was moving very much the same way. We’ve talked about “The Year of the Mobile” for so long and with the discussion of the National Broadband Network, I figured the opportunity was here. So stepping up to GM of Guvera, with the chance to run my own show… Now, I’m here.
The website came about at a time when there wasn’t much competition, now we’re seeing a period where it seems everyone wants to do it… How do you envisage the next year going for the brand? And how will Guvera differentiate itself from the rising competition?
It’s our challenge, and it’s everyone’s challenge within the Mobile Space and Music Industry. It needs to offer a proposition that has scale, and that delivers on the promise; which is audience engagement. Providing a product that is social, and engages people within the areas they want to be engaged in. The technology is there for us to be connected as consumers…You, Me; anybody can be connected at anytime. It’s about providing a product that can do just that and doing that within the mobile side of the business. The first phase is building the awareness, from there it’s about rewarding the user for being onboard and ensuring that our strategies are rewarding that.
The desktop site has been there, we launched it a little while ago. We redesigned it, made it more attractive, there’s more of that coming to make it more appealing to advertisers. But for me, it’s music on the go… All those things about portability and connectivity concentrating on the apps which were only launched roughly two weeks ago.
Already, in that time we’ve seen a massive growth within our numbers, Figures are in excess of 400,000 members. We have had 70,000 downloads of the iPhone app, 15,000 Android and we’re yet to get into the tablet space yet. So, things are looking really good.
We still have a lot to do over the next year and we’ve got challenges due to the aggressiveness of the marketplace. But the fact is we have a product that offers options, there’s the traditional subscription model with unlimited music, very different to competitors because it actually is unlimited, and then there’s the app model which will work really well when we are getting there with the above figures.
Where do we go from there?
From there it’s all about ensuring that the Music Industry has a revenue base that grows. I heard a figure the other day that states in 2000 the Music Industry was worth $34.6 billion, and last year it was worth $16 billion; most of that downloads and buying music online rather than purchasing physical music. So bricks and mortar are struggling, we’ve seen that in publishing where I came from and we’ve seen it in a fragmentation of consumption on TV.
We want to concentrate on delivering the promise of music where you want it. Making Guvera very much… your music, your way.
There has always been talk of expanding into Video Streaming, but the difficulty of breaking into the market due to licensing issues… Is that something Guvera may look into?
We saw that in the BBC with iPlayer and that was a challenge for us locally. The challenges are there… Our first mission is to get the mobile and desktop offerings right. I think we are in the right space now, focusing on that. And if the opportunity arises than, we’ll go there.
Have you discovered any new music since Guvera’s launch?
There is some cool stuff, but my playlists are atrocious. My preferences range from Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker, but then I find myself listening to Fallen Angel “Poison” and I think “what am I doing?”. It’s all pretty diverse.
