Spreaker to Announce 'Major' American Media Partnership to Help Musicians, Radio Personalities Go Mainstream

Started with $1 million in funding,

is a platform for creating and sharing a wide array of audio content.

"We were born with the idea of empowering anyone that wanted to create a radio broadcast," Spreaker CEO Francesco Baschieri told Benzinga. "Now we figured out that we have a pretty complete audio platform so we're trying to attract a different kind of audience -- maybe independent musicians and DJs -- that want to start their own creation." After amassing nearly two million registered users in roughly two and a half years, Spreaker has inked a deal to help its brand – and most of all its users – gain access to mainstream listeners. "We have recently closed a major partnership with one of the main American media companies, a major broadcaster, which will allow us to do some interesting things with our product – both software integration and giving the ability to our hosts to go mainstream," said Baschieri. He declined to name the company in question until the deal has been made public.

"The main difference between Spreaker and other sites out there is that we give you the ability to create audio live," said Baschieri. "You just need your iPhone or iPad or computer, and wherever you are, you can click a button and broadcast live." Baschieri added that, unlike competing sites and products, "We give you all these tools for expressing your creativity and imagination. We give these tools to you in a single product." Like most startups, Spreaker is not a fan of traditional ads. "There's very little [ads]," said Baschieri. "It's not really our main focus. Right now we're a freemium platform. We monetize users producing content. The total amount of stuff that you get for free is pretty interesting. You get total audio storage of 10 hours. You can broadcast live or pre-record segments as long as 30 minutes. "If you want to go longer, if you want to create longer content -- let's say you're not a musician but you're a radio host or a DJ doing DJ sets so you need to have a lot more storage, or you need more event statistics of your listeners, then you would need to upgrade to one of our paid plans." Going forward, Baschieri would like to also explore the possibility of inserting native advertising, similar to Twitter's sponsored tweets. Spreaker's users like the idea, so Baschieri expects that to be the site's second form of revenue.