Ireland's In The Stream

Steve Purdham only wants you to do one thing – listen. Over in Dublin for the launch of his new streaming music service, he seems an optimistic, genuine chap with a clear understanding of where the industry is going. He can name-drop the likes of Funeral Party (which is important) and is prone to saying things like, “Music is actually something that can change the world.”

While the music business scrambles to reverse falling sales and screams for tougher legislation, for his part Purdham sees a chance to grow.
“It’s quite an exciting proposition. Everybody loves music, and the internet is changing the way we consume it,” he reflects. “There’s a big opportunity there if you can get through all the barriers.”
And, as we all know, there are many of these. It must have been tough winning over the major record companies.
“It was, in the earlier days,” he admits. “To be fair to the majors, they had a big challenge facing them. They had to be careful what route they took. But we’ve had tremendous support from both majors and independents.”
There is a feeling that streaming music essentially amounts to giving it away, and people have questioned just how much money services such as Spotify are sending the music-makers. Purdham is keen to debunk a few myths.
“The beauty of this model is that it is about ‘a listen’. Imagine if you could track every time a person listens to a song. We’re not talking about millions of listens or even tens of millions. In Ireland alone, you’re talking about billions, maybe even trillions. Although it’s small amounts of money, when you multiply it by the internet scale, then it becomes quite exciting. Every song we play, whether we sold advertising or not, has been paid for. Free music is free to the consumer but paid for by advertising. And that’s no different to commercial TV and radio. It’s not just promotion, it’s giving bands money for their copyright.”
So what does We7 offer the ordinary Irish punter? The pitch is this: “We7 is an easy way to listen to music, and an easy way to share music, where the artist gets paid. A lot more people are going to start consuming their music on the internet and streaming is a very easy way to do that. Using a service like We7 is even easier. We’re the first people to bring a legal service onto mobile handsets.”
Ireland now has two streaming options – Eircom’s MusicHub, launched before Christmas, and We7. We7 touts a catalogue of over six million songs, Eircom a little over four. The major difference is that We7 is free. They tack on short ads to the start of each song (unlike Spotify in the UK, which has far less intrusive random commercial breaks) – but it’s a small price to pay. No price at all, in fact. To remove the ads costs just €4.99 a month and their Premium Plus service (featuring mobile apps) is €9.99. To put that in perspective, it’s about forty quid cheaper than your TV license for the year. Not bad at all – but do they have decent stuff?
It’s all subjective, but a quick search for James Blake, The Replacements, The Smiths and Villagers gave instant results. No Joanna Newsom sadly, but then we just started listening to Kanye on repeat. It’s web-based, rather than a programme, which slows things down occasionally, but means you can log-in from anywhere. And they seem to want to showcase Irish music and unsigned bands. Purdham elaborates: “When we started we wanted to give anybody the ability to upload music. But if you suddenly put a thousand new bands on the site, nobody listens. The quality can be really, really bad. We had one guy who just recorded himself flushing the loo the whole time.”
Avant garde, we assume.
“So rather than nobody having any presence, we have a new band every two weeks. We give them full presence and expose them in weekly newsletters.”
Already the biggest streaming service in the UK (with three million users), Purdham expects 400,000 to 700,000 people to sign up in Ireland. That’s a big percentage of the population.
“It is quite a big ambition for the first year,” he agrees. “The difference in the UK was that quite a few legal services all came out at the same time and that hasn’t happened in Ireland.”
As we end our conversation, Steve Purdham remains optimistic. “Three years ago it was impossible, two years ago it was improbable, now there is still a lot of work to be done. Like all businesses, you have to take a risk. Exactly like a band. Let’s try it, get out on the road and look for that break. And that break can be a magical event.”