BandPage, a music startup which helps musicians sell their concert tickets and other merchandise to their fans, on Friday announced that it has now been acquired by YouTube. Apparently, the new acquisition will allow musicians to make money through their popularity on the world’s largest video streaming network.
A music startup based in San Francisco, BandPage is home to Pages of over 500,000 artists. It was launched in March 2010 and, was then, an application that allowed artists to create customized fanpages within Facebook. The company was founded by J. Cider in March 2010 and has since been under most musicians’ radars.
The service initially allowed artists to upload and using share tracks, videos, photos and their touring schedule within Facebook. Though this service was later brought down after Facebook shut down these Page apps in 2012. The company lost 90 percent of its traffic and its popularity came down drastically in just 3 months.
This was the dip in BandPages success story.
The company had just raised a big $16 million Series B from GGV Capital which, along with a smaller $9.3 million Series C raise in 2015, prevented the company from drowning. That’s when the services provided by the company started hitting other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Google and YouTube etc.
The service is dedicated to helping musicians build their careers by growing their fan bases and helping them make profits using just their popularity. This is, in fact, a motto shared by YouTube too. BandPage believes that using YouTube’s already well established global distribution platform, the company can help any artist to be discovered.
Our collective goal remains the same: to grow an open network of digital music services, develop intelligent new tools for managing/distributing artist content and commerce, and create new revenue opportunities for all musicians, on YouTube and beyond.
The blog post announcing the acquisition reads.
YouTube has been largely focusing on its music streaming services for a while now. The company’s main aim is to help musicians get through to the people who value their music. Efforts of the company have largely paid off. Like is the case with YouTube Red, the company’s very own ad-free subscription service. The service is free to use, but if you are someone who likes extra exclusive content, YouTube charges you $9.99.
Just last week, the video streaming service announced that we will now have original content over Red. This was one of the few things YouTube’s music subscription service was lacking. We also saw the Google owned company launch its very own music app a few months ago. The makes searching for ‘your’ type of music very simple and gives you many amazing features which make your music experience unforgettable.
Going back a little more down the memory lane, we saw YouTube release ‘Music Insights‘, an analytics tool which allows musicians to find their fans and make data oriented analyses for planning their music and concerts.
All of these developments, along with today’s acquisition of BandPage just holds to show the dedication of the video streaming network.
