Guvera is a new way of acquiring music for free, legitimately. It’s an advertisement-driven system but with a big twist, you have to subscribe to the ad channels to gain credits. It sounds a bit dinky but it does work.

Advertisers create “channels” promoting TV shows, drinks, movies or products and by subscribing to the channel you get credits with which to purchase music. The benefit being, you only see brands and products that you want to look at but best of all bands can be paid by advertisers without the usual stigma of having “sold out”. You get free music, advertisers get exposure to people who want to be sold to and bands get paid for their art. Everyone wins.

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Before you drop your hard-earned on some music you can sample the first 30 seconds of every song. The downloads are 256kbs .mp3 files, and they’re completely DRM free. Each file costs about 1 credit and you get 2 credits for every channel you subscribe too. The catch is, once you’ve subscribed and used your credits you need to subscribe to other channels (channel surf) to gain more. So far the system is only available in Australia and the US (the rest of you have Spotify) and it’s very beta, but it’s going to get bigger.

Guvera has spent several years negotiating rights all around the world and designing this new system to make music free by having advertisers pay for our downloads. As an added bonus we have removed the very concept of “Disruptive Advertising” and replaced it with “Engagement Advertising”.
What that means to you and me is we have removed the white noise of irrelevant crap being thrown at us – and now we only see brands that are actually speaking to us, as opposed to everyone seeing everything.

Tags: guvera, online+music, free+music