In today’s entry we are incredibly excited to preview the much anticipated Vampr Pro for the very first time, as well as the new expanded profiles as they will appear in Milestone 1.
Let’s start with the new profile pages.
As you may have noticed, we’ve done away with the Audition, Biography and Favorites tabs in favor of the new expanded profile. In the expanded profile you will be able to access and enjoy all of the content you’ve come to expect from a Vampr profile in a single page. You can also take advantage of handy shortcuts such as adding a favorite artist from someone else’s profile directly to your own. And perhaps most excitingly, and by popular demand, you can now link all of your other social handles to your Vampr profile in a beautiful and dedicated space.
We’ve also made editing your profile easier and better looking than ever. From the profile tab, simply hit Edit Profile and immediately start customizing your profile with all your latest tracks, pictures and artist information.
Did you happen to spot any locks in the Edit Profile page? Let’s see what happens if you click on one…
Introducing Vampr Pro
Vampr Pro will be arriving with the next version of Vampr and will include the following Premium features on launch:
◦ Make your profile matter with unlimited tracks & videos
◦ Unlimited rewinds – undo your swipes
◦ Search the world and collaborate remotely
◦ More chances to connect per day
◦ Stand out from the crowd with the Pro badge
◦ Hide your profile and search in stealth mode until you are ready to connect
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Over the past several months we’ve been surveying users on the Waiting List to get their feedback on Vampr Pro, and there was one feature which folks wanted more than anything else.
Today we are thrilled to announce that Vampr Pro will be launching with music distribution. Get your music on Spotify, Apple Music and all leading DSPs, and keep 100% of your royalties!
You can subscribe monthly and get all of the above with Vampr Pro for $4.99 or less. That’s less than the price of a coffee for a game-changing service which will help elevate your status on the number one social platform helping creatives to find people to collaborate with, create new music and monetize their work.
If all of that doesn’t sound exciting enough, we’re pleased to announce that with Vampr Pro, what you sign up for is just the tip of the iceberg. We will be adding new features to the Pro suite every month through the end of the year, at the same price point you first subscribed. We will cover some of these future features in a later blog entry.
The arrival of Vampr Pro with distribution, in conjunction with Vampr Publishing, signals the transformation of our social network into a 360 self-service platform for artists. With our products and services, we remove barriers to help you elevate your professional musical life, faster and more efficiently.
So when can you expect to get your hands on the next version of Vampr and Vampr Pro? Much sooner than you think 😉
Josh
Welcome back! We concluded the first blog in this series by promising to share with you a preview of Milestone 1 of Project Sophomore.
For those of you who use and love Vampr, this first release will feel both familiar and completely fresh. Milestone 1 was built from the ground up with the ambition of delivering an experience which improves upon everything possible in the current version of Vampr whilst introducing some new features and a more intuitive user interface based on two years of feature requests and user feedback.
It’s also allowed us to do away with our legacy codebase so we could lay a solid foundation on which to build upon and ship regular updates throughout the remainder of 2020 and into the future.
Today we are going to focus on a couple of specific UI features from Milestone 1.
Discovery – Made Even Simpler
In the current version of Vampr users can change their Discovery Preferences in a number of ways. However if you’ve ever found yourself swiping through profiles, not finding what you’re looking for, you will probably have experienced the pain point of having to first click through to Settings followed by several other clicks just to update your preferences.
In Milestone 1 we have done away with this altogether and made it quicker and easier than ever to launch and modify your settings directly from Discovery mode. Simply tap the Preferences icon in the top left corner to launch a panel overlay which allows you to control your settings whilst staying in Discovery mode.
Sort Your Contacts in Messaging That Works
We won’t beat around the bush. Messaging in Vampr has sucked up until now. There are a whole number of reasons why but we won’t bore you with them as this is a blog series which is focused solely on the future of the platform.
Late last year we prioritised the development of a proprietary messaging solution which will see us rely less on third party providers to reliably deliver messages to and from the user.
Staying in touch with your contacts online is more important than ever so ensuring messaging works is one of our highest priorities.
Another feature that our most ardent users have requested for years is the ability to sort your contacts. When someone has hundreds of connections on Vampr it can become hard to quickly find a filtered list of all the drummers you are connected to, for example. Or perhaps find everyone who listens to hip-hop in your connections list.
So we’ve added filtering in messages. Now you can quickly sort through your contacts by genre or by skill. We hope that this will bring added productivity to a user’s networking flow and open up old conversations with useful connections.
Perhaps most excitingly, Milestone 1 will also ship with Vampr Pro. In the next blog post in this series we will unpack exactly what Vampr Pro has to offer in its first iteration in addition to the new expanded profile pages.
Until then ✌️
It’s been a bloody tough year for people all over the world.
When this moment in history is written about in the future, it may well read as a compelling if not logical set of events with uncanny timing. However, comprehending or explaining the full picture of what’s going on around you while living through it can be extremely overwhelming.
First thing’s first, music is colorblind. Black Lives Matter.
If ever there was a time to come together and stand up against systemic racism, bigotry and violence against minorities, it’s now. From day one, our community has stood for equality across all races, sexes and belief systems, pursuing respectful treatment of one another, with zero tolerance for trouble makers or bullshit. Creating this culture has required leading by example – no downvote button, banning bullies and letting them know why. We operate this way, believing that the starting position should always be one of respect. And let’s not forget, the creative community is prone to a higher incidence of mental health problems than the general community – as artists we expose ourselves to the world and are vulnerable in doing so.
Vulnerability, however, is a quality to be encouraged in all people, from all walks of life. Vulnerability breeds compassion and empathy – traits the world could do with more of right now.
The millions who have marched for Black Lives Matter and those who have supported them in the media and on every social channel show us that, thankfully, the whole world is not inherently racist. Many of us, it would seem, share a common humanity that deplores discrimination against people of color.
Nevertheless, despite our shared values, we have a societal and monetary system that elevates one at the expense of another. Tragically, a system built on endemic racism, prejudice, intolerance and ethnocentrism. It’s no surprise then that we see a direct correlation between communities of color and lower economic status. Again, no surprise when we see that the coronavirus has wreaked havoc on the poor, who have insufficient access to healthcare, education, opportunities and even food.
But acknowledging these issues is simply not enough. As a company we need to continue to lead by example – by showing up to the party with practical solutions and actionable ideas, in the hope we can play a small part in enacting meaningful change. We believe this starts with identifying some of the underlying systemic problems which give oxygen to the many fires and more specific issues we see splashed across the news screen every night. Systemic problems such as the lack of upward mobility, the lack of access to mental and general healthcare, and an affordable education system, with a fair wage for all workers.
This requires generational change. It’s not going to happen overnight, but like those marching in the streets we can do something about it now. In fact, it’s essential that change starts now so that the next generation has a fighting chance at a happier, more peaceful existence on earth.
We believe this starts at the ballot box and with our elected leaders. This is why today we are proud to lend our support to Rock The Vote. This November in America the country has a chance to elect officials all around the country who can begin to address these issues of classism – who can help enact policy to rejuvenate the middle class. Who can make education free again and move towards a healthcare system that acknowledges that access to healthcare is a human right, not a privilege. As a company, and community with users in every country in the world, we hope that this message will resonate beyond the borders of America too. It’s more essential than ever that you do your research as a voter, and then go vote. Progress starts here.
The other movement we are choosing to bring awareness to is R U OK? – a mental health organization based in Australia, which encourages people to check in on their peers to make sure that they’re coping, and if not, help direct them towards resources in support of their mental health. The world is a nuanced mess right now. We know far too many creatives who have been completely blindsided by the lockdowns – who have lost their income and livelihoods due to the shutdown of the live music scene and hospitality industry. Now more than ever these folks need your support, your compassion and your empathy.
Voting in the interests of humanity while supporting one another emotionally are no-brainer ideologies and beliefs we’ve held since long before COVID-19 came along and rocked the world. We hope that by supporting these two movements and creating awareness inside the Vampr community we are playing a small part in moving the world to a place we’d much rather live in.
Josh Simons and Baz Palmer
Co-founders of Vampr
It was a balmy Los Angeles summer evening in August 2017 when the Vampr team, which typically operated remotely since well before COVID-19, concluded a rare two week in-person retreat, as first documented in this blog post. The real purpose of the retreat? To define and map out a product journey, in what would become a careful, methodical and multi-year transformation from a one-to-one meet platform – ala Tinder – to a fully fledged one-stop shop for creatives, with self-service artist tools and a social network interface which more closely resembled that of LinkedIn or Facebook.
In the time since, our plans have evolved and matured as you would expect. With four years of customer feedback under our belt we are now in a fortunate position to plan product and make design decisions based on quantitative demand.
We’ve shared these plans with you in bursts and spouts – including during last year’s crowdfunding drive, and more recently with the mysterious Waiting List feature, where select Vampr users have had the opportunity to play with a prototype of what’s coming next. Keen-eyed Vampr users have watched these plans evolve and have been patient as we’ve defied the odds to raise the funds to build out this ambitious vision.
This next step in our evolution has been referred to variously as Vampr V3 or Next Gen Vampr. However with teams pushing updates to the current apps, marketing campaigns currently underway and critical product releases being worked on in anticipation of the more comprehensive overhaul – such as last week’s milestone Vampr Publishing release – it became clear that we needed a conclusive internal codename to refer to the most important development in our company’s history.
Welcome to Blog #1 in a series of updates to be released throughout 2020 that will take you with us as we preview exciting new features and upcoming Vampr products, and journey towards the release of what we’re now calling Project Sophomore.
What is Project Sophomore?
Project Sophomore represents both the next major version of Vampr and the foundation for future versions of Vampr.
By the end of Summer 2017 Vampr had been in the market for around 15 months. We had grown from 0 users to tens of thousands of users. We now had lots of data and learnings to lean on. Our retention rate, as measured over a 12 month period, was remarkably competitive when compared with the Top 10 music apps in the App Store however it was nowhere near the levels seen in social networks like Instagram or what we’re seeing now with TikTok. From day 1 it was clear that Vampr was attracting a type of user who wasn’t shy about sharing their feedback, requesting features which in their own words would see them return and return more often. In tech these are sometimes referred to as viral hooks or loops.
Every team member had a good idea of what we needed to do. Despite an initial vision of creating a simple and effective discovery and connection tool for musicians, the Vampr userbase was demanding we offer them something which resembled a more traditional social network, with likes, comments, the ability to follow, integrate with more APIs, etc. However, with the obvious cash flow restrictions almost all startups are faced with, we needed to address several elephants in the room:
- The cost involved with such a major overhaul
- We hadn’t, at that point, defined our business model beyond a basic goal of one day offering a subscription, premium version of the product
- No one-to-one meet platform using swipe discovery had ever successfully or even attempted to transition to an open social network
The process of structuring these thoughts began with this two-week workshop where every team member put up their favorite social network, music service, or social feature from other creative platforms, onto a whiteboard. We then asked “why does this feature work”, “how might it work inside Vampr”. After getting our thoughts together and adding user feature requests from the past year we began to build a very early prototype in the form of a clickable wireframe (example below).
This scope was ambitious – we would essentially need to start from scratch from a code perspective – but we had begun to solve problems 2 and 3 from above on paper. In order to solve problem 1 we would need to raise money, and a lot of it. But we at least now had a defined vision, with concrete materials and soon-after a budget which showed a pathway to profitability.
This method of planning is sometimes referred to as Waterfall. It is often criticized for being in stark contrast to Agile development – an approach where you iterate and test new features as nimble and quickly as possible until you find a product market fit and revenue model which is scalable. Agile development is a most advisable pathway for a new startup with no user data and a pile of assumptions driving decision making. However, with mine and Baz’s combined experience of being professional musicians plus years of product feedback and feature requests, we were blessed (or burdened, depending on how you look at it) with a profoundly deep understanding of what our users wanted. This made it essential that we create a blueprint for this waterfall vision, knowing full well that over the course of development and testing new features that the vision would naturally evolve and change, all the while taking an agile approach to building out that vision. These two philosophies of waterfall and agile are not in fact incompatible, but to view them in tandem requires intense planning and an insanely focused attention to detail.
The other understanding we came to was that social networks are essentially a pile of tools bundled together, each tool carrying a significantly different value from one user to another. As we sit here in 2020 on the shoulders of giants this means, somewhat frustratingly, that you can’t really ship a social network with certain tools or features missing which people have come to expect. So how does a startup with less than 15 team members and under two million dollars in funding build out a familiar featureset to Facebook or LinkedIn, especially when our users have expressed they won’t settle for anything less? Iteratively. It’s partly why we recently asked users from our Waiting List to rate these features in priority of their perceived usefulness. It would help us in defining our sprints as we get deeper into building out Project Sophomore.
Project Sophomore is a waterfall vision. The Vampr team has defined the first Milestone 1 release which will ship this summer. This release will contain the first version of Vampr Pro, however the following steps and features will be decided by you, the user. As you will see throughout this blog series or by being a member of the Waiting List, we have a very clear menu of features, each of which have been scoped out and ready to build. Your input and feedback will help us decide which features to ship next. We have budgeted for the remainder of 2020 to deliver as much of this menu as possible, with major new features shipping every two weeks. If we get this right, we hope that Vampr Pro adoption will facilitate the continuation of this radical new approach to user-driven innovation, well into the rest of this decade.
The Journey Towards Sophomore
While some of you have noted that the app hasn’t changed all that much over the past couple of years, the transition to a bigger and better Vampr has been underway for quite some time. Social networks are only as good or robust as their backend which powers the user experience or front end. We began refactoring our backend and real-time messaging service about six months ago in anticipation of the changes to come.
From a corporate and brand perspective we have also been transitioning to the new look for quite some time, with new features on the current apps shipping, somewhat sneakily, in the design language of Project Sophomore. On social media we have been using a new language and design code for well over a year. This has been a calculated evolution so that at no point does the adjustment to Sophomore feel like such a giant leap that we end up alienating our super users. Even the Milestone 1 release this summer will feel comfortably familiar to the current version of Vampr, whilst providing us with a new foundation, written in new code, with which to build the features as seen in our waterfall prototype. Our mission statement from very early on in this process has been ‘avoid adding friction at any point’. This litmus test has been applied to product feature changes, the UX and app language expectations, right through to brand adjustments.
In fact, just last week, alongside the Vampr Publishing release, we simultaneously launched a brand new website with zero fanfare. This significant update to the Vampr website (see below), much like the forthcoming Milestone 1 release of Sophomore, on the surface may appear as though we’ve simply given our old product a new coat of paint.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
With every new Vampr product we’ve shipped or plan to ship in this next phase, we’ve gone back to the drawing board, re-written everything from scratch, kept the features that people love, whilst laying the groundwork for new assets and features to be inserted seamlessly and regularly. Features which will bring the user exponentially more value, without requiring an ugly kind of feature shoehorning which most people typically resent and can spot a mile away in the social networks that they use and love.
For those of you on the Waiting List who have now had the chance to play with the new version of Vampr, we’ve also omitted a couple of exciting new changes, because there’s no fun in giving everything away all at once!
Why Sophomore?
It is often said in music that an artist’s first studio album is the product of a lifetime of experience and inspiration. So when it comes to making your second major studio album, or sophomore album, especially if the first album was a success, there is a perceived pressure to reinvent and make the followup as profound as the first record, but now with only 2-3 years of inspiration and new experiences from which to draw. No pressure!
This next version of Vampr is kind of like our second album. Project Sophomore needs to be our Nevermind, our Late Registration, our Rush of Blood to the Head. We are confident we will deliver on this front. After all, it was your feedback and passion which informed every decision along the way. We hope you will agree!
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If you would like to sign up to the Waiting List to demo Project Sophomore in full, please do so in-app, joining #16,049 other people (and counting) whose collective feedback will help shape the future of Vampr 😎
In the next update in this series we will preview the specific features from Milestone 1 of Project Sophomore. Milestone 1 is the first Summer release of this year-long journey towards the future of Vampr. Stay tuned ✌️
Josh
Can you imagine turning on the TV and hearing one of your tracks playing over the hottest Netflix series? Or imagine seeing an ad for the next Tesla and your song is the soundtrack?!
That’s what the music industry calls a sync — and a very good one at that.
Sync — short for “synchronisation” — refers to music being synchronised with visual images.
There’s thousands of these opportunities signed every day, from video-games, to films, to commercials and TV. But this doesn’t happen unless you have a publishing deal or similar representation.
The problem facing fledgling musicians is that Publishing deals are few and far between — and they’re increasingly hard to come by. Sure, there are companies who will allow you to pay a premium for a chance at these opportunities, but the reality is that the average songwriter on these platforms makes far less than their subscription cost.
Introducing Vampr Publishing — a revolutionary kind of sync representation
- It’s non-exclusive
- It’s opt-in only / cancel whenever you like
- It’s free upfront
- With a 65/35 split in favor of artists, we only take a fee if we sync your tracks
New opportunities. Effortless sign up.
Vampr Publishing will be run from our newly established London office, headed up by Josh Smith, who joins Vampr from Music Gateway. With years of experience in music tech startups, Smith’s goal is to push the independent music industry forward and improve the commercial potential while lowering the barriers to entry for artists. Smith will be supported by Jessy Trengove who recently joined Vampr in her role as Head of Analytics and Insight.
If content is king, then context is key
Publishing was never on the roadmap when Baz and Josh first set out to connect musicians around the world. However as the network grew, so did one question from our users: “How do I get my songs on film?”
As the world’s largest social collaboration platform for young artists, we saw a unique opportunity to quickly build one of the biggest sync representation catalogues in the world, disrupting the music publishing landscape along the way.
We wanted to democratize opportunity and guarantee more favorable and quantifiably fairer terms for all writers and musicians. The Vampr Publishing platform is being built for the hitmakers of tomorrow and will offer licensors a rich catalogue of diverse and original unrepresented tracks ready for the perfect sync. Today marks the start of the revolution.
Why us?
Vampr was founded by Australia’s The Music Network’s 30 Under 30 Power Player, Josh Simons, and multi-award-winning songwriter/guitarist and tech entrepreneur, Baz Palmer. The award-winning app is home to over half a million users and is active in every country. Vampr has helped fledgling musicians broker over 5 million connections worldwide.
Josh comes from a family deeply entrenched in the world of music publishing, from his grandfather Cyril whose 50 year career included serving as the Managing Director of Universal Music Publishing Group and Chairman of the PRS, to his father Tony whose own company represented Michael Nyman as his publisher whilst working with Paul McCartney and Jeff Wayne among others.
Baz has had countless major syncs as a writer, with his tracks used extensively for marketing campaigns, all the way through to TV series and soundtracks of feature films. Baz will tell you that a great publishing operation is essential to having your songs synced. They need to know where and when to pitch your tracks and have the relationships with agencies, music supervisors and creative directors to guarantee your tracks are heard.
Nevertheless in their early days as songwriters, Baz and Josh both experienced the struggle of finding sync opportunities without a traditional publishing deal. This struggle is universal among songwriters. Vampr Publishing was created to solve this problem for the next generation of creative souls around the world.
Sign up to Vampr Publishing for free in-app today!
www.vampr.me
Publishing — Powered by Vampr
Well, so much for stealth mode 😏 It looks like a whole lot of you tapped that little magic multi-colored button on the Vampr home page! Yep, we have lifted the curtain ever so slightly on something new in the world of Vampr. And it’s BIG. For those who want to know what the hell we’re talking about — well, jump on Vampr and get tapping 😎 All will soon be revealed.
