Listen up! It’s time to tune into HerCanberra with Guvera

Posted on 26 January, 2015

It’s Australia Day, and when it comes to music it really only means one thing. Triple J’s hottest 100 songs for 2014 are about to be announced! But gone are the days of pulling out the cassette player to record it patiently. Where CDs have taken over from cassette tapes and vinyl, and  iTunes from CDs, a new direction has been forged for capturing and listening to songs over and over again—and it’s called streaming.

Now streaming isn’t anything new, particularly with a number of services already available both nationally and globally—that number is only continuing to grow. That’s good news for music lovers, but with so many choices it can be hard to choose just one; one that is going to give you exactly what you want.

Well, we think we have the answer to make it just that little bit easier and it’s time you listened up—to HerCanberra.

That’s right, we’ve partnered with Australian-born Guvera to create our very own brand channel where you can tune in and find out what we’re listening to. From Australia Day classics to music that will keep you moving, the HerCanberra channel is ready for you to access. We’ve even created an Australia Day playlist for you to enjoy…and yep, before you even ask Peking Duk is already on it (Amanda insisted).

A little bit about Guvera

Before you do, here’s what you need to know about Guvera and music streaming…

Founded in 2008, the Guvera app itself is just a few months old, but is already dedicated to transforming the way people experience music, and the very reason we decided to jump on board.

You can listen, discover and share music that matters to you with access to millions of tracks from the world’s biggest artists. And before you compare it to the likes of Spotify and SoundCloud, keep in mind one huge difference. It’s Australian—completely and utterly Australian. So there’s the first tick.

Not only was it created on Aussie soil, it’s already winning awards with its mobile app and is associated with some big business names including Fortune 500 company, Lenovo—who recently signed an agreement nominating Guvera as its worldwide music partner.

Clearly aiming high—Guvera has set the mark as a true global player in the digital music streaming industry.

With one of the world’s leading music libraries, Guvera was developed in response to the mass consumption of illegal music online and provides a legal way to access music that awards royalties to the artists and record labels responsible for producing it.

Take your music with you

The second tick is that Guvera is designed to be used across desktop, mobile and tablet devices with (not surprisingly) 95 per cent of its listeners already accessing it via their phone. This means that wherever you and your phone go, so does your music. No more stressing about whether you’ve synced and updated your playlists on iTunes before you head out the door.

#winning—a hashtag that leads to another pretty cool feature—#Play.

It’s a unique feature that provides you with the ability to tailor a music experience based on your current mood, activity or preferences by searching using hashtags (#). You can also search and discover music, as well as manage and share your own playlists.

Plus you can connect with other music fans through Facebook and Twitter or find and follow your own friends, and access their playlists.

If you’re a business, using Guvera to create a unique brand channel means you can create a unique experience for your customers that resonates with your brand or products that you might be currently promoting. How does this benefit you if you’re a listener? It means you can engage with your favourite brands and the styles of music you love including local content with being disrupted by commercial ads.

This free service offers expert-curated playlists with no costs or subscription fees and is based on a non-disruptive ad-funded model, which means you can discover and play the best curated music from around the globe at no cost to you as the consumer. The curated content also means that with a ‘programmed globally, tuned locally’ approach Guvera is able to work with international and local labels and artists (think Peking Duk) to curate content that is in tune with a city’s music scene and trends.

For each market there is someone local, or at the very least in the same country, who handpicks the music but not just those that are hotly contested and developed. Live in 20 countries across the globe, Guvera knows its stuff having tapped into emerging markets like India, Russia and Indonesia.

The bottom line for data usage

So now that you know what Guvera is, it’s probably worth explaining how music streaming actually works and what it means for your data usage.

Put simply, music streaming is a way to listen to music without downloading a file to your computer. Unlike music files that are downloaded and played at any time in the future, a streamed song is played immediately after a small amount of audio data is received. The song file is not store permanently on the destination device (e.g. your phone).

The impact of music steaming on a person’s data usage will be relative to your data plan. Increasingly data plans are becoming more competitive in the marketplace in response to the demand for digital services, including music streaming, video streaming and social media.

In Australia, once you have listened to a track once on Guvera, it is cached (stored away for future reference) on your mobile phone, so you can listen to it offline in the future. This ensures there is no need to utilise data every time you listen to a song. Um, tick number three perhaps?

It’s been mentioned that Guvera is ad-funded but this doesn’t mean a barrage of plugged products and services interrupting your tunes after every 30 seconds. In fact it means the opposite. Guvera’s unique business model has been designed to maximise engagement with listeners in a non-disruptive fashion using a native advertising platform that puts you in control of the advertising you consume. So in other words you get to listen to music for free and on your terms. Tick.

Why we’re partnering with Guvera

This is a partnership and here’s why we’ve chosen Guvera:

• They’re Australian. Not Swedish. Not American. Not Japanese.
• You get access to millions of tracks, hundreds of genres and hours of music from favourite local and international artists.
• There’s the ability to shuffle expertly curated playlists
• You can kick back and enjoy music tailored to your tastes with the innovative #Play feature
• Discover and listen to playlists developed by people in the Guvera community
• It’s super social! You can find, follow and connect with your friends and they’re music.
• You can personalise your profile and your playlists with photos, descriptions and tags. (We love to make things pretty too!)
• It’s FREE to use, legal and you’re still supporting artists.

So how can you access and listen to HerCanberra? 

If you’ve got an Android or Apple device, just head to your Market Store or App Store.

Search Guvera and download the app.

Create your profile and search HerCanberra (though you’ll see us featured on the home page).

Click Follow and you’ll be notified when we create new playlists or upload songs.

Pretty neat, huh?

What’s next?

The Australia Day playlist is just the first we’re releasing – stay tuned for many more to come (we’re already working on our Running playlist!) Got a request or suggestion for one? Let us know!

Image of young girl, happy and dancing, from www.shutterstock.com