Financial Problems to Force Gimme Radio to Go Silent for Good Later This Month
Six years after its launch in 2017, online radio service Gimme Radio will be closing up shop later this mondre those communities could directly connect with artists. In a lengthy post on Medium, Lenane said the service’s unfortunate end stemmed largely from today’s challenging economic climate.
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.
The service is shutting down at a time where more than 1,600 artists had hosted shows or appeared on the platform, with many major labels getting involved both on the programming front and the merchandise side of things.
Lenane said in his post that the company’s goal from the offset was always to cater to a pair of musical fandoms that “were ignored by every other music service.”
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.
You can read Lenane’s full accounting of Gimme Radio’s creation and ultimate demise over on his Medium page. In the meantime, you can still listen to Gimme Metal until April 29.
