New Doco 'Red Flag: Music’s Failed Revolution' To Track Rise & Fall Of Aus Service Guvera

SBS is about to be home to a fascinating new documentary that tracks an Australian music-streaming start-up company that lost people $180 million.

Red Flag: Music’s Failed Revolution is set in the 1990s and 2000s, introducing audiences to the Gold Coast company Guvera, which promised to “revolutionise music forever” but vanished.

The new two-part documentary series promises to be a darkly comedic trip through history hosted by Walkley Award-winning journalist Marc Fennell (The Kingdom, Framed, The Mission) and starring Aussie muso Ben Lee.

The documentary premieres at 8:35 pm on Tuesday, 15 October, on SBS and SBS On Demand. The second episode will air the following Tuesday (22 October) at the same time.

Red Flag will feature exclusive interviews, never-before-seen archival footage and photographs, and reenactments as it follows the rise and fall of Guvera, a music technology start-up company that challenged Spotify in its early days and was once nicknamed the “iTunes Killer.” In its day, Guvera found support from music superstars Alice Cooper and Mos Def.

Guvera promised free, legal MP3 downloads and later entered streaming. The company raised $180 million in just a few years, thanks to superstar backing, beating Spotify, holding parties, and scoring lucrative brand sponsorship deals with Harley Davidson and the Australian Open.

In the documentary, Fennell discovers red flags as he unveils “shady business dealings, ethical question marks, a company on the brink, and many lives left in its wake.”

The documentary includes interviews with the company’s former staff members, investors, music industry experts, and more. A trailer for the documentary is below.

“We’ve seen the explosion of social media, streaming, and AI fundamentally shift how we interact, but the story of Guvera has largely been forgotten,” Fennell, the documentary’s presenter and producer, commented in a statement.

Fennell continued, “The ambitions this company had were gargantuan, and their successes and failures have been too easily overlooked. There was a period where Australia could have been home to the next Spotify (before Spotify became a thing). 

“It’s a roller-coaster of a story with euphoric highs and devastating lows. But most importantly, Guvera’s catastrophic implosion also reveals a brutal reality about Australia – our attitudes towards money, innovation, and risk.”  

In surprising news, it looks like Guvera could be mounting a comeback. CEO Darren Herft recently returned to the company’s board and shared news about a new partnership with people in South Korea.