Photo Credit: Gimme Radio
Gimme Radio is shutting down at the end of this month after more than six years. The move comes just 11 months after its last investor fundraising round of $3 million.
“After six amazing years of building vibrant communities of hundreds of thousands of Metalheads and Americana fans, putting whole dollars in artists’ pockets, creating high quality exclusive programming and content, we have failed to close funding and will be shutting down Gimme Radio, including the Gimme Metal and Gimme Country apps on April 29,” the statement reads.
“I’m really proud of what we achieved, but in this economic climate we could not secure the capital we needed to continue to grow,” adds Tyler Lenane, CEO & Co-Founder of Gimme Radio.
Throughout the life of Gimme Radio, 1,600+ artists hosted shows or appeared on either Gimme Metal or Gimme Country. Independent metal and country labels partnered with Gimme to create millions of dollars worth of merch for their artists. “We did all of this with just six full-time employees and with a little over $7 million in funding over the course of seven years,” the farewell post on Medium reads.
Gimme Radio says its marketing strategy was a key part of its success, building a product around specific genres to give artists access to pre-qualified potential fans all “without having to spend a dime on Facebook and Instagram ads that don’t offer the same type of rich engagement.” Gimme raised over $500,000 through a crowdfunding initiative in 2019.
The company also highlights the success it had with its vinyl of the month club for $30. “The lifetime duration of a vinyl club subscriber is 22 months with a lifetime spend of $660,” not bad for a platform designed around music discovery. Gimme expanded its offering to include merch, physical music, virtual tipping, ticketing, digital goods and even NFTs towards the end.
Gimme Radio thanks its industry investors in helping the experiment including Concord, The Orchard, iHeartMeida, Metal Blade, 5B Artist Management, Telefonica, Techstars Music, Riser House Records, Quartz Hill Records, Wacken Open Air.
“We always struggled to attract the venture capital that a media tech business like Gimme needs to thrive and grow,” the Medium post concludes. “We thought that by hitting a $1M, 12-month run rate, achieving enviable fan engagement metrics, and by proving we could build a real community, we would be in a much better position to raise the kind of capital required to scale this business. On that we were wrong.”