Startup Show4me with the Ukrainian founder raises $15 million investment

Show4me music network, founded by Karen Chiftalaryan, a Ukrainian of Armenian origin, raised $ 15 million investment from a German investment company.

The funding will be spent on promoting the service in already existing markets and further product development. ain reports.

What is Show4me

Show4me was launched in 2015 by Karen Chiftalaryan from Kyiv and 11 other partners. This is the second investment round for the startup – earlier Show4me raised $ 12.8 million from a British IT investment company. According to Chiftalaryan, the startup has about $ 30 million in investment together with the founders’ contributions.

Show4me is positioned as a music social media for interaction between fans and musicians. Musicians create their own artist clubs on the platform, where they can manage the online component of their business, make live streams, sell tickets, distribute merch and of course share exclusive content – tracks, albums, etc.

Fans can access their idols’ artist clubs by subscription. Show4me has a unique business model – any artist club subscription costs a flat $ 1 per year. The service fee 15% of it, and an artist gets the rest. This way, musicians can monetize their fan base much more efficiently than on Facebook, Instagram and other social media.

“If we consider Spotify, Deezer or any other streaming platform, to say nothing of YouTube which pays pennies you need 400,000 streams to make $ 1,000. Depending on the country, that number of streams is generated by about 120,000 – 130,000 fans. So, our $ 1 is the same as if you had 400 listens on Spotify beforehand, ”Chiftalaryan explained in a comment to AIN.UA.

Today, over 30,000 musicians have registered on the platform. Every month Show4me has 3,000-5,000 new registrations from artists. Currently, the main task of the startup is to increase the content and the number of users who are brought to the platform by musicians themselves.

Today, the Show4me team has over 70 employees. Their offices are in Berlin and London. There is currently no office in Ukraine.

Launch in Ukraine 

The service is available in 198 countries. The main startup markets are the USA (50% of business) and the EU (30%), the rest of the markets account for no more than 20%. Show4me plans to enter the Ukrainian market in the first quarter of 2022.

Ukraine Front Lines

Tags: Ukraine