Guvera co-founder is stepping in as the new CEO 

Australian music streaming service Guvera have switched up their management with a new CEO after making a loss for the past 2 years to move forward.

Guvera co-founder and former CEO Darren Heft has stood down from his position at the top of the company to hand it over to fellow co-founder Claes Loberg. Heft will remain on the board to help shape the company’s future but won’t be running the ship after rocky seas have tormented the streamer since launch.

Loberg said: “I am stepping in to the role of CEO. Darren will still have a seat on the board and work with us going forward. My focus as CEO will be to further develop our platform in our top markets including India and Indonesia, as well as my current research into China.”

The music streaming service has built a large audience in the countries where it’s available with over 14 million regular users and more than AUD$180 million in investments. Despite this the company continues to make a loss year-on-year, most likely due to it’s offering of music for free which is hard to make a profit from, as evidenced in freemium veteran Spotify which still makes yearly losses.

However Guvera recently changed up their streaming platform to limit their free tier and offer a paid subscription offering for unlimited music. Whilst better for the company and the music industry the move has received backlash from it’s users which have lost out on their music collections with the update. The users complained that they were able to use the full platform for free before and argued it’s unfair to change their options.

There’s potential to boost profits with their new streaming offerings but they will first have to recoup the losses of their existing, unhappy customers. To make matters worse, as Complete Music Update notes, a report by administrators Deloitte claims Guvera might have been insolvent in 2014 and directors, including Heft and Loberg, “possibly contravened the Corporations Act by ‘not acting with the standard of care and diligence required or in good faith by using their position and information'”.