Ohdio co-founder and CEO Yoga Nandiwardhana is stepping down from his role at the music streaming startup to return to the telco industry although he will be remaining on board as product advisor. Filling the spot will be co-founder Ario S. Tamat who will take over as interim chief executive effective immediately. Nandiwardhana informed DailySocial of the changes via email today.
Prior to Ohdio, Nandiwardhana spent several years at Hutchison Three in charge of value added services before moving to Detik mobile and eventually co-founding Ohdio. While Nandiwardhana did not say where he will be going, we have it on good word that he is off to join XL Axiata. He has yet to reveal his role at at the telco but XL has been in an aggressive push to bolster its digital services and marketing divisions.
Ario Tamat is currently also the CEO of Wooz.in, a brand activation and event oriented company. He took lead of the fledgling startup on his return from Vietnam, as it was about to be spun off from Think.Web, the digital agency which created Wooz.in. Tamat is also a columnist at DailySocial, talking about the digital media and entertainment industry every Monday. Usually.
Wooz.in has now fielded events both locally and overseas and is in a far more stable position that Ohdio is. With contracted clients and a steady influx of partnership requests, perhaps Tamat has found a way to allow him to spend more time nursing Ohdio.
Operations at Ohdio is said to remain as usual although Tamat will have to be a little more hands on now that he’s taking on a larger role. The company did put up a vacancy sign for a junior developer.
Trouble in Ohdio?
Having said that, does this spell trouble for Ohdio? The company until this point has yet to reveal its numbers and it has yet to implement its larger advertising plans, which suggests that it hasn’t achieved the numbers required by advertisers. Even so, it has been adding more features ever since it revamped the service a few months ago to become more like an online radio.
Ohdio now has what it calls Radio Artis which lets people choose an artist of their liking and have Ohdio generate a playlist based on the chosen artist. It also introduced the #np button which shares to Twitter the currently playing song, and it recently added the ability to display the lyrics of the current song.
Ohdio clearly has difficulties in gaining listeners. The company rightly chose to focus on Indonesian music as local artists control the market with an 80:20 ratio according to Nokia’s entertainment services manager Widiasmoro. Choosing to hit the web rather than launching through apps may have been a strategic decision to address the 80 percent of the mobile market which remain on feature phones, but does that market consider online radio as an entertainment option? Has Ohdio done the necessary activities to ensure that it’s at least on the radar of those consumers? At this point, the answer to those questions is, not yet.
