{"id":91948,"date":"2020-09-23T21:13:18","date_gmt":"2020-09-23T20:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?p=91948"},"modified":"2020-09-23T21:13:18","modified_gmt":"2020-09-23T20:13:18","slug":"amuse-revenues-grew-209-in-2019-but-firm-posted-11m-operating-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/amuse-revenues-grew-209-in-2019-but-firm-posted-11m-operating-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"Amuse revenues grew 209% in 2019, but firm posted $11m operating loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since launching in 2016, Sweden-born DIY distribution platform Amuse has drawn a lot<\/em> of music industry attention.<\/p>\n

For one thing, the platform is the original source of breakout acts like Lil Nas X.<\/p>\n

For another, it operates a fairly controversial business model \u2013 including its offer of completely free music distribution for independent artists to services such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and more besides.<\/p>\n

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Today (September 23), MBW has obtained Amuse’s financial results for the 2019 calendar year, via the firm’s filings in its home country of Sweden.<\/p>\n

Amuse’s fiscal 2019 annual report, which you can read in full here,<\/a> reveals that the company generated net revenues of 85.1m SEK<\/strong> (approximately $9.5m <\/strong>at current exchange rates) in the year.<\/p>\n

That was up by some 209%<\/strong> on the 27.6m SEK that Amuse generated in 2018.<\/p>\n

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Amuse’s operating expenses in 2019 were 183.6m<\/strong> SEK ($20.4m<\/strong>), which resulted in an annual operating loss of 98.4m SEK ($10.9m). <\/strong>Its annual net loss stood at 97.8m SEK (also $10.9m).<\/p>\n

In 2018, Amuse posted a net loss of 49m SEK<\/strong>, meaning that this figure nearly doubled year-on-year in 2019.<\/p>\n

Amuse’s report shows that it had 49 employees in 2019, up from 33 the previous year.<\/p>\n

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Amuse’s model was originally two-tiered: free distribution, plus its in-house record label.<\/p>\n

The idea was to sign the most promising artists on the firm’s free tier to its record label, which splits profits 50\/50 with its acts.<\/p>\n

Then, in March this year, Amuse additionally launched Amuse Pro, <\/a>a premium tier offering DIY artists more advanced tools, on top of the basic (and free) digital distribution option, for a monthly fee $7.99 or $59.99 per year.<\/p>\n

Rival UnitedMasters launched<\/a> a similar premium service in July for $5 per month.<\/p>\n

Last week MBW discovered<\/a> that Amuse’s co-founder Andreas Ahlenius has left the company after five years.<\/p>\n

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Last summer, Amuse CEO Diego Farias revealed that his company offered Lil Nas X a $1m+ advance before the artist went on to sign the track to Columbia Records<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

The eye-watering figure raised questions over how Amuse could run a sustainable long-term business by offering a free distribution service<\/span>, while retaining no permanent copyrights and offering $1m+ advances. <\/span>(The Amuse Pro subscription tier hadn’t been launched at the time).<\/p>\n

When MBW interviewed Farias last year, we asked him<\/a> about his company’s long term plans for profitability.<\/span><\/p>\n

Farias told us that “while we are not owning catalog, we think that we can build a long-term catalog where we have these licenses and earn money over the license period”.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/figure>We think that we are on a path to create a sustainable business model. No-one is trying to do this to [just] disrupt the space with venture capital money and mess things up for people.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Diego <\/span>Farias, Amuse (speaking last year)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He added: “We think we can build a sustainable business on that, together with Fast Forward, and additional revenue flows that we are going to introduce.<\/span><\/p>\n

“We think that we are on a path to create a sustainable business model. No-one is trying to do this to [just] disrupt the space with venture capital money and mess things up for people.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Amuse raised a $15.5m Series A funding round<\/a> in May 2018.<\/p>\n

Added Farias, speaking to MBW last year: “The long-term plan is definitely to generate enough revenues from all of the different activities that we do to sustain our business.”<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Distribution company’s net revenues hit $9.5m last year, reveals fiscal report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":44632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[4022],"class_list":["post-91948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-amuse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}