For Dash Radio founder Scott Keeney, streaming music and radio are two very different things.
On the streaming side, Apple and Spotify dominate, and theres not going to be room for much else.
But when it comes to radio, he argued, Its the wild, wild west.Keeney, a.k.a.
DJ Skee, was already one of the biggest radio DJs when he started Dash.
For him, radio is a more curated, personality-driven, lean back experience so Dash Radio focuses on live shows, with a lineup of more than 400 shows across 75 stations, with big names like Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne and Ice Cube as hosts.The startup is announcing that its now reaching 10 million monthly listeners, and that its raised an $8.8 million seed round.Investors include Nimble Ventures, Slow Ventures, Lazerow Ventures, Muzik, Arab Angel, G Ventures, Lindzon Capital Partners, Jason Flom, Orin Snyder and Ian Schaefer.
Warner Bros.
chairman and CEO Kevin Tsujihara and Alibabas former chairman of United States investments Michael Zeisser also invested and are joining the companys board, as is Passport Capital founder John Burbank.Im honored to be joining the board at Dash, and excited about the real change theyre driving across radio, said Tsujihara in the funding announcement.
With their great leadership team, terrific original curated content and an offering unmatched in the market, Dash is positioned to disrupt analog radio and convert listeners to Dash users.Speaking of analog radio, Keeney acknowledged that there are other services (like iHeartRadio) that bring live radio broadcasts online, but he suggested that theyre coming from legacy players who are all burdened by legacy infrastructure.Dash is able to take a different approach.
For one thing, its cut out the long stretches of advertising as Keeney put it, We figured a business model that goes around these traditional insertion-based advertising models.That doesnt means its avoiding sponsorships.
In fact, it recently opened a studio in the Empire State Building (it already has a studio in Los Angeles) in partnership with Build-A-Bear, which also operates a branded kids station on Dash.
What Dash isnt going to do is interrupt the music and shows with ads.Keeney also suggested that Dash might eventually introduce a paid, premium plan with features like on-demand show archives.He made it clear that if Dash really is going to be the future of radio, it needs to allow new talent to succeed as well.
That includes surfacing new artists (Keeney said Post Malones first radio interview was on Dash), and also new DJs.
After all, Snoop Dogg is an incredible talent, but hes never going to be known primarily as a Dash Radio personality.Now were starting to see people emerging, they are going to be known as somebody from Dash Radio, Keeney said.