Seedcamp Podcast, Episode 69: Ben Drury, Founder of 7Digital, his journey building a digital music marketplace

In the ‘Seedcamp Podcast Series’ we talk with key people in the tech startup industry to hear their stories and gleam key advice and learnings from their experiences.

Ben Drury, Founder of 7Digital, joined Seedcamp’s Dave Haynes for this interview talking through his journey as an entrepreneur. From starting in the first dot-com boom within early online music tech to building 7Digital during the dot-com crash, Ben discusses everything from building new services for a new era of technology, acquiring and selling other companies, to 7Digital’s own IPO.

Ben began his career in 1996 as a founder of dotmusic.com, an internal venture at United News and Media. In 2000 Ben was headhunted by BT Group to head up the broadband music efforts at their ISP BT Openworld. At BT, Ben pioneered music and video downloads on dotmusic with the UK’s first unlimited subscription offer. Following the partnership between BT and Yahoo! to form BT Yahoo! in 2003, Ben engineered the sale of dotmusic to Yahoo!

In January 2004, Ben founded 7digital with James Kane.  He  was named by Growing Business Magazine as a Young Gun in 2006, and in Billboard’s prestigious 40 Under 40 list in 2011.  Ben is currently a Non-Executive Director of Intercede, and has served as Deputy Chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) and on the board of the Official UK Charts Company. Ben graduated from King’s College London with BSc (Hons) Physics with Philosophy of Science.

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