Guvera shake-up sees exit of Australian GM

It hasn’t been a good week for Australian music streaming services. Days after Songl was given a month to operate, Guvera has parted ways with its Australian General Manager, Scott Hamilton.

Guvera said that a global restructure of the service meant “the role of General Manager Australia was no longer required.”  Guvera Chairman and CEO Darren Herft, who co-founded the service with Claes Loberg and Brad Christensen, will oversee Australian operations. There will be no other personnel changes, it emphasised.

Hamilton joined in January 2013 from a background in media publishing, cross-media sales and monetising the digital space for companies as Yahoo and BBC Worldwide.

Guvera which is majority-owned by Gold Coast-based Amma Private Equity, started in 2008 as a music download service in Australia and the US. It expanded to streaming in 12 countries, and has a target of 40 countries by the end of 2014.

It offers 14 million tracks and, according to Hamilton in an interview last year, returns 70% of its revenue to publishers, record companies, songwriters and musicians. In January this year it hit the 720,000-member mark, of which 150,000 to 200,000 are active monthly. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald said that in the 2012/13 financial year Guvera recorded a loss of $7.2 million on revenue of $149,000.

Last year the company moved into the Indonesian market, and in March this year, became a worldwide partner with tech company Lenovo to have its streaming service pre-installed in its mobile devices.