His company Muzu.tv is taking on YouTube with a dedicated website for music video

When Ciaran Bollard and Mark French started up music video site Muzu.tv they had no intention of fighting the record labels in a licensing war. Instead, they decided to be a "friend of the industry".

As Bollard explains: "We understood the people in the business and how to build relationships. You don't do it by launching a site without licensing. To this day, we pay every band, whether they're signed or unsigned."

It took five years to go from concept to market (three of those were spent securing licensing deals with labels such as Universal and Sony) but the business will turn over £3m-4m this year, offers 80,000 videos on its site and attracts one million unique users each month.

"We always believed in fair trade for the bands," says Bollard. "For every 1,000 streams of its video, a band makes around £3.50." That's seven times the amount a band would make on YouTube, he says.

The result is that the record industry is pleased. "We're doing right by the bands and the labels, which is why they trust us to syndicate our whole catalogue to partners including AOL and [music magazine] NME," says Bollard. Even better, backers, including Oyster Capital's Bill McCabe, are happy. "Investors can be a nightmare, but they've been supportive," adds Bollard.