Indie digital duo target success in Britain
Sunday, August 16, 2009 – By Dick O’Brien
An Irish digital music retailer is hoping to raise its first round of seed capital after successfully launching in Ireland and recently moving into Britain.

Although operating in what is now a crowded online marketplace dominated by the likes of Apple’s iTunes Store, Downloadmusic.ie differs from many of its competitors because it deals primarily with independent artists and its main mode of transaction is via premium rate text messages.

The service – the brainchild of Johnny Beirne and Gareth McDaid – was launched in 2006 with a catalogue of 100 independent artists. Beirne said building up the initial list of artists was difficult and often involved one-to-one contact over Myspace.com, which these days is one of the primary online presences for independent music artists.

The service has since expanded to cover more than 1,100 independent artists and now includes well-known Irish acts such as The Saw Doctors, Republic of Loose and Aslan.

Beirne and McDaid last year moved into Britain with the launch of Textatrack.co.uk.

While initially offering music for sale through credit card transactions, the site saw a 15fold increase in business when it added premium rate text messages as a way of buying songs.

Each track is assigned a unique number, which users can then text to a premium rate number in order to buy that specific track. They receive a text message back to their phone with a number, which then allows the user to log on to the website and download the track to their computer.

The company has also begun selling music directly to mobile phones, whereby music is downloaded onto the handset rather than a computer. Beirne said this now accounted for about 25 per cent of all music sold.

According to Beirne, the Irish operation is now selling 3,000 tracks per month, with the recently launched British business selling several hundred. He said the business was loss-making, but stressed that the company had spent its initial period proving the concept and bringing it to market.

It planned to raise between €250,000 and €500,000 in seed funding and was targeting angel investors for the investment. Beirne said the capital would be used to finance further international expansion, which would then be used to help attract first-round venture capital funding.

Previous Sunday Business Post Articles about Downloadmusic.ie

16th September 2006 – Irish music download site launched

29th January 2007 – Huge digital impact on music charts

14th April 2007 – The best places to buy all your music online