Two years ago, ArtistData founder and serial entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan launched Onesheet to give bands and musicians an easy way to build a social presence on the Web. Akin to an “About.me for bands,” Onesheet allows musicians and artists to build a one-page, aggregated dossier from their existing social channels and third-party services, whether it be to link their music from SoundCloud, Bandcamp or iTunes or to post videos from YouTube and Vimeo.
Having attracted tens of thousands of bands and entertainers, Onesheet is today announcing that it has been acquired by Bandzoogle, a website creation platform for musicians. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Bandzoogle CEO David Dufresne tells us that Onesheet will remain an independent product and will be relaunched shortly, as part of the company’s larger, platform-wide redesign, which he says has been “two years in the making.”
While Bandzoogle may not be a household name in the U.S., the Montreal-based company has managed to survive in a tough and volatile market by providing independent bands and musicians with affordable tools through which they can manage all of their online activity. Today, the company powers tens of thousands of musician websites, allowing them to sell directly to fans through its built-in store, promote their music with email blasts and social network integration and manage their interactions with fans.
Boiled down, Bandzoogle is a musician-centric, website building platform, which its CEO describes as a “WordPress, or more accurately a Wix or Squarespace made specifically for a band’s website.” To compete in what has become an increasingly active space, Dufresne says that the company has focused its attention on offering more targeted features, like music and merchandise sales tools and mailing list management.
While Bandzoogle competes in part with companies like Bandcamp, Fanbridge and MailChimp, the CEO says, its key differentiator is that it doesn’t take a cut from its users’ online sales. Instead, the company relies solely on revenue derived from the monthly or annual fees bands pay to use its advanced management tools.
The CEO says that the platform has been growing steadily and is now profitable, having passed 20,000 paid users last year. Unlike some others of this ilk, you won’t find any big stars on Bandzoogle, as the company has intentionally gone after the long tail, catering to small and mid-level indie artists and an array of DIY entertainers and bands, Dufresne says.
As of today, Bandzoogle doesn’t offer a free-mium product, only a free trial, the CEO tells us, so part of the motivation behind acquiring Onesheet was to be able to appeal to a new set of users by offering a free product with premium options and offer a more diversified pricing model. While Onesheet initially launched on a mission to be the “About.me for bands,” it later expanded its scope to include new verticals, hoping to cater to the entertainment industry as a whole.
With its acquisition of Onesheet, the CEO says that it now plans to do the same, moving into new verticals by opening up its platform to actors, comedians and models, for example, and it wants to leverage Onesheet’s user base to do that. Today, Bandzoogle has partnerships with ReverbNation and offers technical integrations with Topspin’s commerce features, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, SoundCloud, Songkick, Bandsintown, Tumblr, Instagram and more, and distribution partnerships with an array of companies and associations, including Sonicbids and ASCAP — to name a few.
The Bandzoogle CEO tells us that the company has had a long relationship with (Onesheet founder) Mulligan, going back to his days at ArtistData, as Bandzoogle was one of the first to integrate. “So we’ve been watching Onesheet closely since it launched,” Dufresne says. “We knew eventually we were either going to compete, partner or acquire the company since the beginning, because it was the missing piece in our product offering.”
The Onesheet co-founders were about to relaunch the platform and return to their original “simple, official homepage” concept, when Bandzoogle made its first offer, he says. At the time, they were more or less re-pivoting to the “About.me for bands” idea, back from the “Linkedin for entertainers” concept they had gone with last year. As a result, Mulligan (and Dufresne) say that the timing was right.
“There aren’t a lot of companies in the artist services space that survive,” the Onesheet co-founder tells us. “Bandzoogle is unique in this way … We’ve actually talked for years about a bigger partnership, but we never managed to find the right arrangement. But now we have.”
Registration for Bandzoogle’s new site-plus-Onesheet is closed, but those interested can sign up to get on an early invite list, Dufresne says. The company is looking to migrate Onesheet’s current codebase to its new fresh back-end and tweak its UI before its full relaunch, which the CEO expects to have completed by late summer. In the meantime, current Onesheet users won’t be affected.
For more, find the acquisition announcement here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/eVlftJDF2u8/
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