Sounds like the title of a new Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings adventure, doesn’t it? Although not quite as exciting, something which has intrigued me for the last several months is the power and opportunity of an active niche social network.
Beyond the obvious — that every member of our community shares a passion for music, and Vampr is the venue to meet and discuss — I wanted to explore the power of Vampr as 1) an educational tool (the music industry is complicated and hard to navigate) and 2) a platform where one had the opportunity to reach a specific person or specific group of people.
This has presented a couple of challenges. We created — by design — a closed social network. That is ‘one-to-one’. In an open social network such as Facebook we don’t necessarily or consciously consider that time spent on the platform is almost always educational. We are constantly absorbing information through a feed (ie. Mary bought a new dog yesterday, she also liked a New York Times article).
In a niche social network the opportunity to learn about how an industry or group of people work is incredibly powerful. In our case, the bedroom musician who didn’t go to a music college doesn’t necessarily know that in order to put on the most basic of club shows you will need to find persons to man the merch desk, control the lighting rig, mix front of house audio, sort out the monitor mix, pay you at the end of the show, etc.
However if I saw that several of my contacts in Vampr were starting to build out these connections, the sub-conscious begins to absorb those patterns, the inquisitive mind digs a little deeper, and one’s understanding of both the industry and potential of the platform grows.
So a fundamental shift in how Vampr functions would be necessary to achieve our ambition of increasing usefulness and educational value to the community. You will start to see these changes roll out as the year progresses.
This extensive feature set and re-vamp of Vampr (pun intended) should also go a long way to addressing the second ambition I mentioned above: Vampr as a service or platform where one had the opportunity to reach a specific person or specific group of people.
When we started brainstorming and researching these ideas, it became immediately clear that features such as a feed wouldn’t be very useful if you couldn’t get lost in a Vampr-style rabbit-hole, much like a late night Wikipedia session, jumping from topic to topic (or in our case, person to person).
However, if we all have this love for playing and listening to music in common, surely we must be a little more connected than we realise?
And thus began our look into the Vampr bacon number. That is, how many steps away is one user from another user on average ie., how many people will I have to hop between in order to get an introduction to X, based on who is connected to who on Vampr alone.
As described on Wikipedia: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlor game based on the “six degrees of separation” concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart. Movie buffs challenge each other to find the shortest path between an arbitrary actor and prolific actor Kevin Bacon. It rests on the assumption that anyone involved in the Hollywood film industry can be linked through their film roles to Bacon within six steps.
Thanks to our monster growth over the last six months we had a sample size more than adequate to begin looking into this. Facebook haven’t publicly spoken about their bacon number since 2011, however at the time it was 4.74. In 2009 Twitter’s bacon number was around 5.
In order for us to validate the unique opportunities and power we believed inherent in the niche social network, and Vampr specifically, our number had to be significantly smaller. Without naming anyone specifically, we are aware of many accomplished musicians, songwriters, producers and managers on the platform.
We wanted to see concrete evidence that someone with enough hunger and thirst for success could use Vampr to reach exactly who they wanted to reach. There will still of course come that moment where you might need to ask someone to vouch for you or make an introduction (we also plan on addressing that this year) but if our bacon number was small enough then we could almost guarantee that the power was back in the user’s hands and the hustle was their responsibility.
Our job is to get out of the way and make things easier.
And with that said, we discovered that the Vampr bacon number between active users is 2.72.
This is tighter than the Hollywood number of 2.9. Apparently what happens in Hollywood, also goes down in home studios at a global scale!
Right now, Vampr still has a long way to go. The product needs to mature, as does the userbase. We need to introduce features and change the functionality of the app so you can best take advantage of the opportunity as shown above. But the findings of our research, the Vampr bacon number, was validating, and it should be hopeful and exciting for our userbase too.
Until next time…
Josh ✌️
Greetings everyone! We are proud to announce that, starting this month, Vampr will be heading out on the road. In our first ever tour of North America we will be hitting New York, San Jose and Los Angeles in order to spread awareness about Vampr and our goal of connecting all musicians everywhere.
To start, we will be hosting a networking event with Let’s All Build at LMHQ in New York on Friday March 23. We’re calling the evening SOUND SCREEN and in addition to networking will feature a panel with representatives from Building Beats, License Lounge and Underground Producers Alliance.
Next stop is San Jose on Sunday April 15, where we are co-presenting a Devin The Dude show at Back Bar SoFA. The show is on track to sell out — if you’re keen to come, make sure you purchase tickets well ahead of time. You will find us in a Vampr booth at the back of the room where we’ll be handing out swag including the famous Vampr guitar pick!
Finally, every Monday this May we will be presenting The Sunset Jam at The Viper Room. The Sunset Jam is a unique showcase event providing musicians in LA an environment to network in. Depending on the night you might mingle with record label reps, A&R scouts, producers, songwriters, musical directors or bands seeking musicians.
This first anouncement of events is only the tip of the iceberg for us. We look forward to guaging the response to each event so we can plan bigger and better events for the future. The ultimate goal here is to not only provide our community a place to congregate in a way that’s exciting and ephemeral, but to put a face to the technology that you have so magnificently embraced.
We would love to see every single one of you come out and get to know both other members of our community and members of the Vampr team. So much great music has already come out of Vampr and we’re betting that with events like these, we’ll start to see that much more.
EDIT: We have added a quick trans-pacific pit stop in Sydney, Australia on April 12 & 13, where will be presenting as part of the FastForward music conference.
For more information, visit the links below and secure your spot at the Vampr Roadshow today!
New York — Friday March 23 — 6pm — https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sound-screen-music-industry-panel-event-tickets-43910489456
Sydney (Australia) — Thursday April 12 & Friday April 13 — 1030am — https://sydney.fastforward.xyz
San Jose — Sunday April 15 — 8pm — https://www.eventbrite.com/e/devin-the-dude-live-presented-by-nu-ricks-and-vampr-tickets-42297980398
Los Angeles — Mondays in May — 730pm — http://www.viperroom.com/
As of today, Vampr users have swiped on each other 10 million times! Here’s to the 10 millionth person who was swiped on — introducing Thea Jones!
For many of you, the wait is finally over. As of this week, Vampr is now available in both Spanish and Turkish versions. The localization of Vampr has been a long time coming and we are excited to hear all of your feedback!
The goal of Vampr has always been to connect you with people all over the world. With this new update we just made that a whole lot easier. With a large portion of our users living in Spanish and Turkish speaking countries, it made sense to start there, however, we are far from finished. We are currently working tirelessly on getting Vampr out in all languages!
To those of you in China, France, Japan, Portugal and Russia please send us your own Hello videos at social@vampr.me for a chance to be featured on our social media accounts! To all of you who speak Spanish or Turkish, check out Vampr now in your native tongue.
Needless to say, every Vampr member is important to us and we want to make Vampr a great experience no matter where you are or where you come from. Just hearing that someone from Germany connected with someone from Texas, gets us excited and shows us that we are doing our job. Please continue sending us your Vampr collaborations. I speak on behalf of the whole Vampr team when I say that we are more than looking forward to hearing all of the amazing music you guys are about to make and love the music you have made so far. Be on the lookout for constant updates to our app and keep Playing Together ✌️
Just a quick one today to share with y’all some really exciting news for our community.
Apple has just released its annual list of favorite apps from around the world. Known as ‘Best of 2017’ we were selected as one of their Trends of the Year in the Lifestyle category!
For us, and for you, this is validation of a product and a community which we’ve all worked sincerely hard to create. We are on track to pass 200,000 signups by New Years and so much of that is word of mouth — please keep up the hustle. Without it we wouldn’t be getting acknowledgement from the likes of Apple or Facebook or Amazon or any of the incredible partners we’ve had a chance to work with in 2017.
Josh ✌️
Ps. See Star Wars 😱
Pps. Check out the final Vampr Story for the year in a wonderfully festive video below!
Happy holiday season! What a massive year it’s been for this Vampr community of ours.
We’ve just passed 1 million connections!
Meaning more of you are discovering, connecting and collaborating to make more and more new and wonderful music for the world — and we’re only just getting started 😊
In a remarkably short amount of time the Vampr community has become the most active and engaged music networking platform in the world. A round of applause to you all 👏
Our Vampr Stories series continues to highlight your unique and personal journeys of artistic collaboration, with tracks and videos flowing in from all corners of the world. To say we LOVE these stories would be a huge understatement.
While you have been busy making music we have been busy on our new website that will shift the spotlight onto you, the creators. We want to show the kinds of opportunities that continue to be created for new and existing users alike on Vampr.
Check it out → www.vampr.me
As some of you are aware our growth has not been without its hiccups, but rest assured we continue to throw every bit of talent and resources we can muster to fix bugs and improve speed, and we continue to encourage you to let us know directly if something is broken or not working for you.
Last up, please let us know if you have your own Vampr Story that you want to share with the world — we will be running new content on the website regularly!
Take care everyone,
Thanks again and see you in 2018.
Josh, Baz & the Vampr Team ✌️
