News - 20/08/2014

Russian startup Zvooq raises $20 million for a music streaming service

Russian startup Zvooq raises $20 million for a music streaming service



Russia is a tough market for music. Even though since iTunes launched in the country at the end of 2012 legal digital sales have increased piracy is still the name of the game when it comes to online music consumption.

The startup Zvooq aims to change all that and just raised $20 million in funding from the e-commerce company Ulmart and the Finnish private equity fund Essedel Capital.

The company has created a streaming service aimed specifically at the Russian market and which includes nine other former Soviet republics. It is a freemium offering so it has an ad-supported tier, but its premium tier has a scaled approach, offering access to three albums per day for 33RUB per month and to seven albums per day for 66RUB per month. These equate to just under a dollar and just over a dollar per month.

Spotify is not currently available in Russia, Deezer and Google Play Music are both available but the price is much higher than that charged by Zvooq and perhaps unaffordable for the majority of the population.

The next step for Zvooq is to become a better-known entity and to close some high-profile partnership with carriers that would allow it to thrive just like Deezer did in its early days thanks to the deal with Orange in France. After all the cost of the subscription is so low that is could easily be integrated in the cost of a mobile subscription plan.

Russia is moving towards a more regulated environment online when it comes to the protection of copyrighted material which could be very good news for both the recording and the movie industries.


(Andrea Leonelli)

© 2024 All rights reserved. Rockol.com S.r.l. Website image policy

Rockol

  • Rockol only uses images and photos made available for promotional purposes (“for press use”) by record companies, artist managements and p.r. agencies.
  • Said images are used to exert a right to report and a finality of the criticism, in a degraded mode compliant to copyright laws, and exclusively inclosed in our own informative content.
  • Only non-exclusive images addressed to newspaper use and, in general, copyright-free are accepted.
  • Live photos are published when licensed by photographers whose copyright is quoted.
  • Rockol is available to pay the right holder a fair fee should a published image’s author be unknown at the time of publishing.

Feedback

Please immediately report the presence of images possibly not compliant with the above cases so as to quickly verify an improper use: where confirmed, we would immediately proceed to their removal.