Australian music tech company Jaxsta has acquired Vampr, a social network connecting musicians and artists, dubbed as “LinkedIn for creatives”.
The acquisition expands Jaxsta’s community by 1.3 million creators, the publicly listed company said in a release today (February 22).
Vampr, launched in 2016, claims to help creatives and artists find people to work with, create new music and monetize their work through its features.
It has a premium subscription service called Vampr Pro, a distribution arm called Vampr Publishing, and it also runs Vampr Academy, which offers courses and practical video lessons for creatives.
What attracted Jaxsta to Vampr was its app and users that “represent a growing portion of the independent music community.”
Jaxsta noted that Vampr’s ‘freemium’ business model already converts 4% of weekly active users into paying subscribers. The business model is expected to accelerate when Vampr Pro is bundled with the Jaxsta Creator subscription, said Jaxsta.
“Combining these products creates a much more compelling product for the independent artist and musician,” Jaxsta added.
Meanwhile, Jaxsta, which claims to be “the world’s only official music credits database,” holds more than 310 million official, deep-linked music credits across 80 million pages that were sourced from over 349 data partners, including record labels, publishers and industry associations.
In November, Jaxsta launched a new feature that matches works to recordings, allowing its users to secure lost royalties, source song licenses and syncs.
The merger with Jaxsta comes just three months after Vampr received a strategic investment from New York-based independent rights management and music services company, Downtown Music Holdings, which also saw the latter providing Vampr access to its marketing tools, online publications and publishing tools via Songtrust, a music royalty collection and publishing administration company.
Jaxsta did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition, but Beth Appleton — who was promoted to CEO at Jaxsta in late April — said the purchase of Vampr “represents a rare opportunity to accelerate the expansion of our business.”
The acquisition came over two years after Jaxsta received a AUS $1.42 million (USD $974,000) investment from Los-Angeles based B2B music rights and licensing marketplace Songtradr.
Meanwhile, Vampr’s founder and CEO Josh Simons will be joining Jaxsta as Chief Strategy Officer following the merger to oversee the integration of Jaxsta’s product portfolio.
“Combining our grassroots network with the definitive official music credits database is both a highly strategic and logical combination which we believe will provide great value to Vampr and Jaxsta’s users as well as our mutual shareholders,” says Simons.
“Our team cannot wait to get started and I’m personally very excited to work with Beth and the Jaxsta team to build transformational products for the music industry and music lovers,” Simons continued.
Appleton added: “We continue to focus on driving revenue growth and profitability capitalizing on the bedrock of the Jaxsta platform and the moat we have built through our industry leading music data solution. Together, I believe we are going to be an exceptional company that will be at the forefront of the rapidly evolving music industry landscape”.
The Vampr purchase further expands Jaxsta’s user base after adding another 2 million creators in July when Jaxsta partnered with US digital music distribution platform DistroKid.
Shares of Jaxsta closed up 25% on the Australian Stock Exchange on Wednesday (February 22).Music Business Worldwide
