Swedish Dimest Powers ABBA's Viral Music Store

Dimest logoDimest, a Stockholm-based startup, has provided a music store solution using which ABBA has released their entire song library online for people to buy directly from ABBA’s official web site. Soon the purchases can also be made on blogs and social media sites like Facebook, as Dimest’s solution is based on a music store widget which everybody can copy and place on the website of their choice. This way Dimest allows artists to sell their music without middlemen directly to their fans. Through the widget it is possible for example to browse albums, listen to samples of tracks, and watch music videos. What about the most important question? Yes, DRM-free 320kbs MP3. Try it out yourself, I grabbed the ABBA one and placed it here (purchases only enabled in Sweden so far, though):

The record company Universal states that ABBA is only the beginning, and they will try Dimest’s solution with many other artists as well, in quest to “give our artists the opportunity to get closer to the fans”. As ABBA’s version does not allow buying outside Sweden as of now, below is also a widget selling music from Måns Zelmerlöw, the Swedish representative in Eurovision Song Contest. The song’s are priced at 10 SEK (around 0.86 EUR or 1.09 USD; there seems to be also a service fee of 3 SEK added, though).

Dimest was founded by a musician and songwriter Jonas Saeed, other co-founders being Hans Desmond, previous Managing Director Warner Chappell Music Scandinavia, and Sanji Tandan, former Managing Director Warner Music Sweden. Due to these connections the firm has established partnerships with all major labels in Sweden, and is currently negotiating with other Scandinavian countries. Dimest is also working with Aftonbladet, the biggest media group in Sweden, and a number of Swedish blogs. The firm has funding from a few private investors, but is looking to raise more funding to support the growth plans.

Dimest ScreenshotInterestingly, the solution of Dimest scales beyond music as well – it could be used for any digital content, like books, games, movies, ring tones, documents, lyrics, and software. The founder Jonas Saeed in fact commented to ArcticStartup that their big goal for this year is to launch a global web service available to anyone to upload their digital content, create customized storefront widget, set their prices of choice, and start selling. Dimest offers 90 % revenue share to artists and content providers.

There have been music store widgets before as well, but Dimest has a good advantage in their close relationships with the record labels, high revenue share, and the fact that they support all types of content by default. Widget solution in general is really good for viral word-of-mouth effect including the commercial side along. It brings the content all over the web, without having to pull users to some specific web site or storefront. It will not be easy to scale the service, though, as all sellable content will reside on Dimest’s servers.

The official press release (in Swedish; try Google Translate version).