Guvera music site uses guerrilla advertising tactics

Australian music download website Guvera offers free music to its users — by bombarding them with the advertising campaigns of its sponsors.

Currently in beta, Guvera offers users free music downloads while still paying the artists by having advertisers pay for the tracks users download. The advertisers in return get to advertise their products to specific demographics based on age, gender, location and music tastes, and obtain valuable anonymous data about their target markets.

Users fill out profile information to earn credits from advertisers, selected based on the user's likes and dislikes, with which to purchase songs. When selecting a song to stream or download, the user is also then directed to select an advertiser to sponsor the download. At this time, Guvera has 46 Australian advertising partners, including companies such as McDonalds, Band Hero, Harley Davidson and Tony Bianco.

The site has also announced new music industry partnerships as it gears up to a worldwide 30 March launch. Currently, the Guvera beta catalogue consists of music from first partner EMI music. Today, CEO Claes Loberg announced that, by the time of launch, the site expects to have 3 million songs available.

Included in Guvera's new partners are:

• Universal Music
• IODA
• Shock Records
• INgrooves
• APRA | AMCOS

While the service does look pretty good (apart from a few website navigation glitches), one does have to raise an eyebrow at the appropriation of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, after whom the service is named, for a commercial venture.