180 – The IMDb of the Music Industry – with Vasja Veber of Viberate

Do you wish there was a comprehensive online database of artists, venues, events and festivals? Are you looking for a forward-looking, technologically driven platform to help you grow your career as an artist? In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, Vasja Veber of Viberate shares what the platform is all about, how it was developed and what they plan to achieve with it. Podcast Highlights: 00:34 – What is Viberate? 05:17 – What’s new with Viberate? 06:55 – How can an independent artist take advantage of the platform? 10:44 – Is blockchain the answer to the music industry? 14:39 – The music industry – an endless field of business opportunities? 18:22 – Copywriting and creative processes 19:44 – What are the greatest challenges you’ve overcome? 25:22 – What are the greatest victories you’ve experienced? 28:23 – Are there any books that have helped you on your journey? 29:59 – Is there anything else I should have asked? Transcription: David Andrew Wiebe: Today I'm chatting with co-founder and business development director at Viberate, Vasja Veber. How are you today Vasja? Vasja Veber: Good. How are you? D.A.: I'm great. Thanks so much for joining me. Vasja: Awesome. D.A.: I think we're going to have a good conversation today about the IMDb for the music industry. You know, it seems like people are only just beginning to understand the value of data in the industry. It's a foregone conclusion in some of the other sectors out there, but I think its value isn’t properly understood in music. So, tell us about Viberate and why it was created. Vasja: So, it was first created as a band project because our background is in music management. So, myself and my other co founder, we've been managing a world-famous techno DJ, UMEK, for years. It’s when it was still in the times of Myspace and Google+ so it was quite a long time ago. We were advertising a lot. We're investing a lot of money into his presence. Back then, Facebook was still a very effective place to be and to invest money in. But we couldn't figure out how those investments are actually reflecting in the DJ’s career. Was he more popular because we invested money into advertising? That's why we started a simple social media managing website. It was called topdjs.com back then. We were measuring just simple social media metrics – how many followers a certain DJ is getting in a day, or a week, or a month. We did this for a thousand DJs that we entered manually into the data. So, we're measuring Facebook, Twitter. Like I said, back then it was still MySpace and Google+ and Instagram. And, it just took off. So, we opened up the database. In a matter of over a year, we got 30,000 user-generated profiles. So, people were adding new DJs into the database because they wanted to see how they're performing in terms of popularity. And then, we saw an opportunity. We followed the market and we raised some money. At the beginning, our angel round was $1 million. We went away from just measuring popularity of DJs. We said, “Okay. Let's go to all genres.” That's why we created Viberate. The name is actually derived from rating the vibe. That's why the extra “e” in the middle. Yeah. And the years go by, we again raised some more money. Today, Viberate employs 65 people full time. And our office is in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Plus, around 60 more all across the world. Those are mostly contributors around the world, because the database is crowdsourcing curated. And today we have nearly half a million profiles of musicians, about 160,000 venues, and we have around half a million events at any given moment in the database. So, the easiest way to describe it is we're doing what IMDb is doing for the music industry. So like IMDb is for the movies and Viberate is for the music industry. We're creating profiles and collecting profiles of musicians. Right now, when I say we have half a million musicians in the database, some will say, “Yeah, but I know services that have more than that.” That's true but we have unique artists. Our rule is one artist, one profile. That's why we rely on crowdsourcing and curating because we have by far the cleanest data set in the world. Other services usually scrape all the data sources they could get a hand on. If you look, let's say for Tiësto who is a world-famous DJ, you will get like five, six, even 15 profiles for the same DJ because everything is done with machines. And, that's why we said, “Okay. We need human touch.” We curate everything. It takes a lot of effort. It costs a lot of money, but at the end, it makes the service relevant and cool. D.A.: Yeah, I love that explanation. So, is it fair to say that you're building it into a fairly comprehensive database in time? Vasja: Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly. That's our first focus is that we want to be as relevant as possible. D.A.: So, is there anything new with Viberate that we should know about? Any new features or something that's changed? Vasja: Well, we just launched our map view for venues. Let's say you travel to London for business and you take an additional weekend to go check the scene there, you can just open the map of London and venues are going to pop up, plus events that are taking place in London that we can do there. And you can just browse through the map. You can click through the venue. You can check what's going on there. You can even buy tickets. It's a really cool feature. Plus, we just recently launched a festival app platform. Right now, we have around 4,000 festival profiles in the database. Festivals can claim their profiles. And then, they can create their own mobile app without any coding knowledge. They just need a few clicks, and we do the rest. They can offer iOS and Android app to their festival goers. It's a really cool feature. It's a subscription-based service. So, there's no starting cost for festivals. People love it. We did a pilot launch with five festivals, and 80% of all festival goers downloaded the app and were using it like crazy. All of a sudden it becomes the festival's main communication channel with their clients. It’s a really cool feature. D.A.: Yeah, sounds like there's a lot of practical ways to use it. Whether you're a fan or a venue owner or event organizer or what have you. I'm sure something that my listeners are going to be curious to know is how does an independent artist take advantage of the platform? Vasja: So independent artists are actually our main target group here, aside from promoters, because they probably already have their profile on Viberate, but they don't know it yet. They can go to the server. They can search their name. I'm pretty sure that 90% of them are going to find their profile already in the database. And then they can claim it. Once they claim it, they take complete control over it, and they can use it instead of their website because it contains all the information that actually would be necessary on their official website. We collect gig dates that we get from tapping into APIs of ticket providers. We highlight the hottest content that they put on their official channels. We have a recommendation engine so we will let people know who are similar artists. And then, we analyze how artists are following each other on social media. So, if you go to, let's say Metallica’s profile, you'll be surprised to see that they're following Lady Gaga on Instagram. And this is the feature that only we have. It's an interesting thing to see how bands and musicians are following each other. It's a huge recognition if you're a small garage band, and you just all of a sudden get followed by huge superstar. That means something. And people usually brag about it. It's a huge recognition if you're a small garage band, and you just all of a sudden get followed by huge superstar.Share on X But yeah, independent artists can use their profiles instead of their official websites. They can send the link to their profile to promoters and say, “Hey, this is me. This is my stuff here. Check me out. Why don't you book me?” One of our co-founders, the DJ I manage. He's really a high-profile techno DJ. We deleted his official website. And now, if you type in UMEK.si, which is his name, it's going to redirect you directly to his profile. Right now, that’s the biggest advantage. You can have your website, it's already done. So, you don't have to do it yourself. You just have to register a domain and redirect it to your Viberate profile and you're done. And you don’t have to update it. You just keep doing what you're doing. Keep uploading stuff to your YouTube channel. Keep updating your Twitter or your Instagram. We're going to filter out the hottest content. So, the content that your fans are most engaged with is going to pop up on your Vibrate profile. D.A.: Maybe I'm reading into this a little bit but certainly seems reminiscent of Myspace, right? Like one thing I remember talking to venue owners and event organizers, they liked that artists were able to kind of have everything on one page, which made it easy for them to decide whether or not to book this artist. Yeah, this kind of seems a little bit like a throwback to that. Except much cleaner and nicer. Vasja: Yeah, Myspace had a horrible user experience. D.A.: It really did, yeah. But it had its advantages in terms of like growing your fan base and so forth, right, which is why artists kind of tended towards it. So, I think, you know, it's high time that we should have some kind of platform that replaces it because Facebook is a powerful marketing platform, but it's just not doing the job that Myspace used to do for artists. Vasja: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. D.A.: So, before we got into recording today's conversation, we talked a little bit about blockchain technology. As you mentioned,