“I had no idea what Crowdmix was. We had people meet with them and they left saying they didn’t know what it was either.”

Phil Hutcheon, CEO of ticketing startup Dice, has just seen his own company raise $6m of Series A funding. But it’s another higher-funded London startup that’s on his mind when he speaks to Music Ally.

“If someone’s spent that much money and have that many people there working on the product without launching, it’s stupid! You’ve got to release something and prove the technology works, prove the business,” he says.

“You’ve got to be exposed to your audience and really be thinking about your business at each step of the way. You can’t just be a discovery app that doesn’t have any business model around it.”

It would be a stretch to describe Dice as the anti-Crowdmix, as the two startups were focused on different ideas. But since its London-only launch in 2014 as a joint venture between Hutcheon and creative studio ustwo, Dice has been following the step-by-step approach.

Its $6m Series A round came as Dice kicked off a new layer to its partnership with Apple. The startup has been a guest playlist-curator on Apple Music since January, but this month it’s also the only non-Apple channel for people to win and redeem tickets to this month’s Apple Music Festival.

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