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Business News Digital
B2B streaming service Soundtrack Your Brand raises funding for expansion
By Andy Malt | Published on Monday 20 February 2017
Swedish start-up Soundtrack Your Brand has raised $22 million of new investment for its B2B streaming venture
The company, which powers the Spotify For Business service currently available in Sweden, Norway and Finland, provides fully licensed streaming music for businesses to play to their customers – ie with a public performance licence included, in addition to the licences Spotify, or whoever, needs to stream the music in the first place. Although not the only service dabbling in this space, it seems to be the one making the most headway, and it now has plans to expand into the US, Asia-Pacific and further into Europe.
“While our competitors are focused on shipping CDs by mail to large chains in the US and Europe, we are growing the size of this market by digital means”, says CEO Ola Sars, formerly COO of Beats Music, of the company’s more traditional competitors in the pre-licensed in-store music domain. “We distribute our platform more efficiently and are continually improving the product experience. By selling online we reach the entire market, all the way down to mom-and-pops that nobody sold to before. And we do it on a global scale”.
Meanwhile co-founder and former Spotify exec Andreas Liffgarden talks up the curation the digital approach to in-store music allows. “Background music today is sold as a utility, and there’s rarely much thought going into what music brands are playing and why”, he says. “Today’s background music sucks for brands and consumers alike, and it’s hurting the music industry at large. As lovers of music and technology, we’re completely overhauling this industry, to once and for all kill bad background music”.
New investors include Nordic venture capital fund Industrifonden and the UK-based Balderton Capital. Industrifonden’s Johan Englund and Balderton’s Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen will also join the company’s board of directors.
