Last week British music service Bloom.FM abruptly shut down to new sign-ups when its sole investor withdrew funding. Bloom CEO Oleg Fomenko has been forthright and active on Twitter, raising hopes for new investment and alerting users to interest from new investors.

We spoke to Oleg Fomenko about how the revival effort is going, and about his vision of a future in which music services can operate less precariously.

RAIN: You’ve had tremendous difficulty in the past week, and no doubt Bloom.FM users appreciate how publicly communicative you have been.

“We’re trying to get out  of this intact; the least I can do is be communicative. The more people know, the better. Hopefully we’ll get a new lease on life. It’s worth fighting for.”

RAIN: You have set a deadline of this Friday for investor bids. Any update?

“Due to the speed of the process I don’t expect bids to appear before Friday. We gave people just a few days. We know we won’t command an amazing premium in the market. We want to give people sufficient time for due diligence. I expect we will know more by mid-day Friday.”

RAIN: When you explained that “margins are too low and growth costs are too high,” were you referring to music licensing costs?

“We’re in the forefront of a fight for consumers.”

“Yes. Generally, this industry right now is plighted by two things: Licenses are quite hard to come by, margins are quite low. In order to grow the business you have to invest heavily for user acquisition and marketing. There are so many illegal and free alternatives out there, you need to let users know you exist, and give them a darn good reason to come to you. We’re in the forefront of a fight for consumers. That costs money. Our margins are quite low, to make into a compelling business case … at the moment.

“We’ve gone through this in the past. When small retailers were selling vinyl they were not making much margin. Then there was consolidation, and Virgin megastores started, and the margins were distributed more fairly in the value chain. I’m sure this is the same process we’re going to see in this market. When large players such as Spotify (and including ourselves) are generating considerable revenues, there will be re-distribution of margin. It has to happen.”

“Hopefully we’ll get a new lease on life. It’s worth fighting for.”

RAIN: When you talk about re-distributing margins across the value chain, do you mean that as the streaming audience scales, music rights-holders might charge smaller percentages of a bigger pie?

“Yes. It will happen through negotiations with rights-owners. If you’re generating quite a lot of money, [music royalty] percentage levels can go down, and everyone can be satisfied.”