NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / March 4, 2015 / When investors hear the phrase "the next big thing in social networking" or the next Facebook or the next Twitter, it sounds almost hackneyed. It seems everyone these days is attacking the social networking angle. But if that same phrase were uttered by someone like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg or Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, it carries some weight, especially if Zuckerberg and Dorsey were working together on the project in some make-believe entrepreneurial tag-team scenario.
So when investors hear the phrase "the next big thing in music" or internet radio, the reaction is similarly skeptical. But that same pitch coming from the founder of MTV and Nickelodeon, or the former CEO of RCA Records, does carry some weight. Especially if the founder of MTV and the CEO of RCA Records were working together on the project.
But the thing is, they actually are.
The product is called Cur Music, the company Cur Media (CURM), led by CEO Tom Brophy, chaired by MTV, Nickelodeon, and ESPN2 founder John Lack, and vice chaired by former RCA Records CEO Robert Jamieson. The three are all personally invested in this as the company's top three shareholders. The model is a streaming music service priced somewhere between free advertising-supported Pandora (P), and $10 a month on-demand Spotify and Beats.
Up until this month through, Cur Music was just a nice idea on paper, but on February 10th after months of negotiations, Cur secured its first digital content streaming agreement with MediaNet Digital, a music licensing provider with a library of over 22 million songs.
Where the social networking part comes in is that Cur is putting social features on its application to enable subscribers to overlay their videos with music essentially creating their own amateur on-demand music videos, share songs or playlists with other users and take "musical selfies", best pictured as a Whatsapp-Pandora-Spotify on-demand hybrid or tribrid. The Alpha version is already out on the iPhone to 100 participants for testing, with final product launch expected for midyear.
High Valuations for Music Streamers
The valuations of leading streaming music services are quite high considering their earnings. Pandora's market cap is currently at $3.2B despite repeated losses and a cumulative loss of nearly $200M, which belies the perhaps failed model of free advertising-supported music streaming services. Sirius XM Radio (SIRI),the paid satellite radio streaming model whose former chief programmer Jay Clark is now Cur's chief programmer, is valued at over $20B and finally achieving consistent quarterly profits of close to $150M. It is nevertheless is still $5.44B in the red since its founding.