Music site We7.com charts success

How-do.co.uk, Wednesday, 18 February 2009

Online music site, We7.com, the brainchild of Cheshire businessman Steve Purdham and rock star Peter Gabriel is aiming to double users in 2009. The venture allows music fans to listen to music for free, but each track is preceded by an advert. With close to a million users already, they’re aiming to hit 2m by the end of the year. Purdham, the former chief executive of Surfcontrol, told How-Do that the whole thing has proved "irrationally seductive."

"It’s all come together through fate. We [Purdham and Gabriel] first heard of the idea in 2006/2007 and we went in as investors, but I ended up wanting to run it." Describing it as a "work in progress," Purdham admits that it’s been a difficult 18 months to get everything in place. "We had to answer 3 questions. Can you get the music? Would an audience come and would advertisers pay the right rate to sustain it? So far we’ve only answered the first 2. We’ve got increasing numbers of unique hits and subscribers and 3.5m tracks online, so now we can go to advertisers to give them what they want."

As previously reported, one advertiser is Littlewoods. "We tell advertisers to forget the music, just tell us what demographic they’re aiming for and we’ll find the right songs. We can do it by age, location, gender, or jazz, blues and so on. We don’t link ads to specific artists." The majors have also now come on board: Music site We7.com charts success "I was seen as the devil, mentioning the 2 things labels hated the most ‘free music’ and ‘MP3 files!’" Sony signed a deal this time last year, with EMI, Warner and Universal following suit.

We7.com launched on November 11, 2008.