Mixcloud is all over the business press today, and in a remarkable turnabout for DJ streaming sites, it’s actually good news for once.
Dubbed a site that “offers an audio streaming platform designed for long-form content” (which is the most technowonky description for “DJ mixes” that I’ve ever heard), Mixcloud has scored an $11.5 million investment lead by WndrCo and it looks like it’s leading to a big expansion, according to TechCrunch:
The injection of capital will be used to scale the service globally and for product development, says the company. This will include doubling down on the U.S., hence Mixcloud’s new backers, and growing the company’s 22-person team, both in London and New York (where Perez is now based). On the product side, I understand the plan is to “diversify the platform,” which would appear to point to a recent licensing deal with Warner and new paid Mixcloud consumer offerings, making the company less reliant on display advertising and other types of brand sponsorship alone.
The article also points out that outside of some funding via UK government grants, Mixcloud has never taken any outside funding since its founding in 2008.
“We are fairly rare, if not unique,” Perez tells me, in his understated way. “We quit our jobs and incorporated the company in 2008 and then the next two years was the challenge of starting any new company, around building the team, trying to raise funding, and in our case doing these innovate types of [music] licenses. And, being straight up honest with you, we couldn’t fundraise. We couldn’t find anybody to put in money. It was a very different time back then”.
Such bootstrapping is certainly unique in the music streaming space, where SoundCloud has run at a constant loss, shedding tens of millions of investors’ cash per year for quite some time.
(We contacted SoundCloud for comment, but they were busy setting large piles of cash on fire in the “nap room” of their headquarters.)
