News - 01/04/2014

BandPage completes its bounce-back with a $9.25 million round

BandPage completes its bounce-back with a $9.25 million round


When Facebook introduced its new Timeline and BandPage lost 90% of its traffic, back in in 2012, few would have bet on the company bouncing back from near-catastrophe and raising a new $9.25 million round.

But that’s exactly what happened, as the company managed to steer itself away from Facebook and deploy an API-driven strategy aiming to get up-to-date content updated directly by the bands on as many platforms as possible.

The round was led by Mohr Davidow ventures and GGV Capital. Both firms had been involved in the previous round and BandPage mentions that they were instrumental in guiding and supporting the company to where it is today.

As BandPage's VP of Marketing and Artist Communications Doug Scott told me during a Digital Music Trends interview at MIDEM earlier this year, the strategic shift was also possible due to the fact that the company still had quite a bit of money in the bank from its B Round ($16m, closed in August 2011) which allowed it to keep developing new products. If the company had been in need of raising another round when the Facebook shift happened its situation would have been a lot more difficult.

BandPage through its new strategy can now count on partnerships with Vevo, Rhapsody, Xbox Music, LyricFind, Live Nation, Google and Clear Channel.

The company added to its blog post announcing the C Round a quote from Brian Message, manager of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, who stated: “BandPage is playing a critical role in empowering musicians to further their careers in the digital age. The future of the music business is the direct musician-to-fan connection and, by working with the music services to build a channel through which musicians can directly reach their fans with content and commercial offers, BandPage is helping musicians capitalize on the tremendous opportunity facing the music business today.”

Indeed, the wave of competing digital music services that have flooded the marketplace of the past two years has highlighted the difficulty in keeping information pertaining artists up-to-date, with even companies like Rovi who have been in the game for a long time struggling to keep up due to the fact that their content is driven by editorial.

BandPage - by allowing artists to edit their own information directly - ensures that as long as the band, label or management have their eyes on the ball the correct information will be propagated everywhere.

(Andrea Leonelli)

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