After six years, Gimme Radio is shutting down the Gimme Metal and Gimme Country apps. Tyler Lenane, CEO & Co-Founder of Gimme Radio Inc., has issued the following statement:
"On July 29th, 2017, I published a piece entitled, “What is This That Stands Before Me?” — a line lifted from the first track off the first Black Sabbath record. The article announced the launch of Gimme Radio. In the piece I explained that after years of shaping the digital music industry at companies like Apple, Beats, Napster, and Google, myself and co-founders Jon Maples, Andy Gilliland, and David Rosenberg were going to change digital music forever. We saw the shortcomings, and we were here to fix them.
Our goals were not simple and not small. We set out to create a new platform where fans could have meaningful connections with one another and the artists they loved. On Gimme, music discovery wasn’t going to be dictated by algorithms or editorially driven “thematic” playlists, but rather hand-picked by the most trusted sources — the artists. We wanted to build a venue where fans of genres outside of mainstream hip hop and pop were not marginalized, but catered to; and where the business model was not obtrusive ads or a one-size-fits all $9.99 monthly subscription, but selling the goods and services fans craved.
And change it we did. In a time before the words “creator economy,” “social audio,” and even “community” were commonplace for digital media products and services, we built two vibrant communities of hundreds of thousands of fans that were ignored by every other music service: Gimme Metal for the metalheads and Gimme Country for the fans of Americana and Alternative Country. At a time when there were no off-the-shelf chat services, we built our own; where there was no software to deliver true radio-like quality experiences to the phone, we took old school terrestrial radio software and rejiggered it for a digital-first, mobile experience; because there were no systems that could automatically plug into multiple wholesalers and vendors and connect with an e-commerce storefront, we built one.
Everything we did started and ended with the music fan. We knew that music fans don’t just come in one size, and so we built for the four music fan personas we identified: the Influencer, the Explorer, the Socializer, and the Collector. And we created revenue streams that played into each of these personas’ spending habits.
Ask the hundreds of thousands of fans who registered for the service or the 1,600-plus artists who hosted shows or appeared on the platform; ask the independent Metal and Country labels with whom we’ve created millions of dollars worth of exclusive goods and services. They’ll all say the same thing: Gimme matters. And what’s most astounding, is that we did all of this with just six full-time employees and with a little over $7M in funding over the course of six years. I’m incredibly proud of this small, but powerful team who forever changed the digital music landscape, and I’m confident that Gimme has proved that building communities of fans on a genre-by-genre basis is the next step in the evolution of streaming music.
But, sadly, today, I’m writing to announce that we are pulling the plug on Gimme on April 29, 2023. Even though the music fans, artists, and much of the music industry love Gimme, and even though we proved that engaged communities could generate real money at a higher average revenue per user than other music platforms, we unfortunately find ourselves in an economic climate where we have been unable to raise the financing needed to support the streaming services and grow Gimme to reach all music fans across all genres.
But before April 28th arrives, I wanted to tell our story and share some of our learnings. They are important."
Read more, here.
