Malmö-based Tunaspot announced funding about a week ago in the paper Sydsvenskan, managing to gather €200k from German private investors. With the funding round, they’ll move offices to Berlin to work on the project full time, and will be in closer proximitiy to their investors, who are said to have a close ties to Berlin’s electronic music scene.
The company produces a location-based playlist service, which allows users to dig into cities to see what people are playing.
Tunaspot is able to gather users from their Spotify app, which unfortunately they are not unable to directly monetize due to Spotify’s rules of their platform. Instead it seems like they hope to take their userbase mobile.
By doing so, they’ll bump into more competition, such as with Helsinki-based Clerkd, which does basically the same thing, give or take a few features. Tunaspot will have the added bump of their current 250,000 users, but will have to convert them to mobile users.
Being able to drill into music on a national or neighborhood level is definitely cool to see how tastes differ over geography, but the question how these services will monetize still remains.
Today Tunaspot has 100,000 users, and plans to have 250,000 by the end of the year.
