Peter Gabriel’s CueSongs Goes Belly-Up, Taking £500k Free Money With It

Peter Gabriel-backed online music platform CueSongs has gone into receivership. The recent music licensing start-up received £500k of public funding from the government just two years ago. The Register reports: The notice was filed on June 20th. CueSongs promised “frictionless music licensing for online broadcast” and was run by Ed Averdieck, who had a stint at Nokia’s Comes With Music. CueSongs handled sync licensing, the burgeoning business of licensing music for use in TV, movies and games. We7, Gabriel’s earlier investment, was sold to Tesco in 2012. Shortly before this “exit”, We7 was also a beneficiary of public cash thanks to one of the government’s more dubious cashgasms. That saw it hand over £1.8m for a “cloud radio” exploration, with the cash divvied up between hard-pressed startups including… er, BT and Yahoo! The startup received £500,000 of public funding just two years ago from what was then called the Technology Strategy Board. The TSB was a hangover from Gordon Brown’s post-crash interventionist industrial policy, that was enthusiastically seized upon and later rebranded by the Coalition government. Lib Dem Business Minister Vince Cable took particular pride in the quango, which oversees a network of hubs and innovation “catapults”. It isn’t the [...]