Andreas Ahlenius, the co-founder of Sweden-born DIY distribution service Amuse has left the company.<\/p>\n
The exec announced the news via a post published on LinkedIn last week, in which he wrote that “after almost five years it’s time for me to move on”.<\/p>\n
Ahlenius was previously Director of Product at Amuse since October 2019, having previously served as the startup’s Global Label Director.<\/p>\n
Prior to Amuse, Ahlenius was the Commercial Director at Universal Music Group Sweden.<\/p>\n
Founded in 2015, Amuse offers a free\u00a0digital distribution service<\/a> for DIY acts and distributes hundreds of thousands of artists globally.<\/p>\n It also runs its own in-house record label.<\/p>\n Amuse raised $15.5m in Series A funding<\/a> from Raine Ventures and Lakestar in May 2018.<\/p>\n “After almost five years it’s time for me to move on. It’s been a challenging and exciting journey but we managed to build something quite big. A service that delivers more music than almost any other distribution company in the world.”<\/p>\n Andreas Ahlenius (pictured)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Mach, the company launched<\/a> Amuse Pro, a new subscription tier for $7.99 per month or $59.99 per year, offering extra tools like team accounts, royalty splits and faster upload times.<\/p>\n Amuse’s in-house label signs artists hand-picked by its A&R team, licensing rights for a set period while splitting any resultant profits 50\/50 with its acts.<\/p>\n In Ahlenius’s post, he stated that “we started Amuse with the belief that the next star would start their career on a service like ours, if we built it right” and notes that the likes of Lil Tecca and Lil Nas X used the service early in their careers.<\/p>\n In June last year the company said it offered Lil Nas X a $1 million dollar advance<\/a>, prior to his eventual signing with Colombia.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was obvious this kid was taking off,” said Diego Farias, CEO and Co-founder of Amuse, speaking at MIDEM in Cannes, France. “The initial conversations we had with Lil Nas X [were]: \u2018I want to stay independent, I want to do this on my own, blah blah blah.\u2019 I ended up offering him an insane check with incredible terms\u2026 north of a million dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n Amuse recently joined<\/a> independent collective licensing agency Merlin, which\u00a0means that Amuse\u2019s artists will benefit from commercial terms of Merlin\u2019s multi-territory licensing deals with the likes of Spotify, TikTok<\/a>, Pandora,\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,\u00a0Boomplay<\/a>\u00a0and Deezer, as well as China\u2019s Alibaba, NetEase Cloud Music and Tencent Music.<\/p>\n