PAYG music streaming service Psonar announces CrowdCube investment campaign

Psonar, the pay-as-you-go music streaming service that made its mission to provide an alternative to the £10-per-month subscription model, announced a CrowdCube investment campaign. The company is offering 5.93% equity in exchange for £250,000. 

The campaign is off to a good start since the London Co-investment Fund has committed investing up to £100,000 in the company on a matched funding basis.

Psonar has already incorporated Universal Music Group’s catalogue and is in negotiations with Warner and Sony - its current catalogue spans 2.5 million tracks. 

The company’s pay-as-you-go model means that users are be able to pre-pay into their accounts and then pay a penny per track listened to, making it - for a moderate user consumer - a more affordable option than services like Spotify and Deezer. 

In order to end up paying the same as a Spotify subscriber, a Psonar user would have to listen to over 1,000 songs per month on the service which equates roughly to 66 hours per month (based on a 4-minute track).

The company’s co-founder and CEO Martin Rigby stated: “The investment that we are raising on Crowdcube will position the service for international expansion, which includes launching the service in other European territories and the USA at the end of this year. We anticipate raising a larger series A round in late 2015 or early 2016 to accelerate Psonar’s global roll-out plan.”

The latest reports on Apple’s upcoming subscription service indicate that Apple did not manage to get the labels to agree to a drop of the subscription cost from £9.99 to £7.99, so it looks like Psonar is - amongst subscription services - uniquely positioned to capture a slice of the market that is willing to pay for music streaming but cannot or does not want to face a bill for £120 per year. 

 

(Andrea Leonelli)