Vinyl Group strikes deal to sell ads for global music licensing platform Songtradr

Music technology company Vinyl Group (ASX: VNL) is amping up its media clout after reaching a deal to represent the digital advertising inventory of Songtradr, the world's largest business-to-business (B2B) music licensing platform and a holder of almost a fifth of Vinyl Group's shares.

The new commercial agreement will allow Vinyl Group to manage and sell advertising across Songtradr’s portfolio of digital properties, as well as bundle its own services, in a move expected to grow the scale of its US-based advertising business by up to 20-fold.

Vinyl Group's origins are in servicing music creators and stakeholders through music credits database Jaxsta and musician-oriented social network Vampr, with the latter founded by its CEO Josh Simons as a swipe-discovery, Tinder-style platform for music industry professionals that is now the largest of its kind globally.

Simons tells Business News Australia that while these two brands primarily provide solutions for music creators and rights holders, Vinyl Group wanted to find ways to better engage with music fans.

The first major step in that direction was a $10 million deal reached late last year to acquire The Brag Media - the publisher of the Australian and New Zealand editions of Rolling Stone and Variety magazines, as well TheBrag.com, The Music Network and Tone Deaf.

"Everything that we do, and really our reason for existing, is to create products and tools to help the music ecosystem thrive, and in order to do a good job of that you need distribution," says Simons, who last week won the 2024 Melbourne Young Entrepreneur Award - Digital Disruptor.

"The missing piece of those platforms is they're never very much used for fans. We had fans on both that are just obsessed with music and wanted to read metadata and check out credits, but it's a niche.

"Typically, in my experience with music tech companies, the ones that make it like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Beat Port, they all started making products for the creator and then the creators flocked there - and fans sort of came second. Part of going into music media was about fast-tracking that."

Bolstered by investments from the likes of Songtradr, which was founded in Australia but is based in the US, as well as WiseTech (ASX: WTC) founder Richard White and Washington H. Soul Pattinson (ASX: SOL) chairman Robert Millner, Vinyl Group has been on an acquisition spree, buying up the assets of Mediaweek, Funkified Entertainment, and web3 collectibles company Serenade. 

"There’s a world where Vampr users want to promote their single, and just like you can use Facebook ads to boost your new song on Facebook, now you can, in theory, be able to boost it on Rolling Stone or any one of our mastheads frankly," Simons says.

"That's definitely a product that we're working on. I don't have an ETA (expected time of arrival) on when that will be ready for market.

"We've got this big hairy audacious goal of connecting 1,000 of the leading brands in the world with 100 million music creators and a billion fans."

That ambition has been stoked by the latest deal, whereby Songtradr's existing inventory will be into the Vampr ad network, with Vinyl Group retaining 50 per cent of net proceeds for any business procured under the agreement.

Vinyl Group highlights that Songtradr’s digital platforms attract more than 20 million unique viewers each month, offering substantial reach for advertisers.

"We are thrilled to be deepening our commercial relationship with Songtradr, accelerating our growth in digital advertising," says Simons.

"This agreement broadens our capabilities and establishes the Vampr Ad Network’s position as a key player in the global music advertising ecosystem."

Songtradr CEO Paul Wiltshire says he is confident this collaboration will drive significant value for brands and audiences.

"Songtradr sees a distinct opportunity for our digital properties to benefit from Vinyl Group’s existing and growing advertising network," he says.