Digital music aggregator and distributor
TuneCore, a division of Brooklyn-based YourTunes Inc., has announced a new $7 million round of venture funding from appropriately-named Silicon Valley firm
Opus Capital. It's the first institutional round for three-year-old TuneCore, and it arrives a week after the company struck a distribution
deal with social music discovery service iLike Inc. Opus will take a seat on the company's board of directors alongside founding CEO Jeff Price and a representative from Guitar Center Inc., which made an equity investment in the startup --
reportedly for a majority stake -- that was
revealed last year.
TuneCore helps artists and labels distribute their music to online stores such as Apple Inc.'s [
AAPL] iTunes, Amazon.com Inc. [
AMZN], as well as subscription services such as eMusic Inc. and RealNetworks Inc.'s [
RNWK] Rhapsody. The company gives artists the option of distributing digital albums for 99 cents per song, an additional 99 cents per store, and roughly $20 per year for storage and maintenance, or digital singles for a flat fee of about $10 per year. Although the stores themselves typically take a cut of the retail price for each song sold, TuneCore doesn't -- artists get to keep all the remaining royalties.
Guitar Center is itself owned by private equity firm Bain Capital, which
paid $2.2 billion to acquire the musical instrument seller last fall.
-- Paul BonanosFor more, see VentureBeat
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