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And the winners are……. 👀

We held a special Halloween Happy Hour last month with cash prizes + more for spooky Vamp creation and engagement. See the winners below!

WINNER OF BEST VAMP 🥇

Our favourite Vamp winner is Ahleya Alexis and they have won $100 cash! In addition, we will be reposting our favourite Vamp across all of our social channels.

Check it out for yourself below:

>> WATCH NOW

WINNER OF BEST COMMENT 🥇

We also had a prize that users could win by simply engaging! The prize for the best comment was 1 month free of Vampr Academy + Pro! 🎓🏆

This comment made us stop and notice. Congratulations to Pixi Lotus!

HONORABLE MENTIONS 🏅

It was a really tight competition and there were so many great Vamps to choose from. It was so tough, that we decided to award several honorable mentions as well! 🏅

Congratulations to:

Natalia Skrzypiec
Aaron Youd
Futuretunes
Anoushka Naik

We loved what everyone came up with and can’t wait to see more incredible content from our creative community. 🤘

>> GET VAMPING

We’re excited to add Downtown Music to our cap-table, with the global music services giant making a strategic investment as part of Vampr’s Series Seed-3 investment round, providing for vertical expansion and to integrate in-platform transaction functionality.

In addition to their financial investment, Downtown Music’s integrated marketing services company found.ee will power another new artist growth solution, Vampr Marketing. The new service will bring unique marketing tools and access to premium sites including Billboard, Forbes, GQ and Rolling Stone to our users, with a machine learning powered platform that does the hard work to accelerate artist’s career growth.

Our partnership with Downtown also extends to our publishing division, with Songtrust administering the Vampr Publishing catalog. Vampr Publishing, launched in 2020, now represents over 60K songs with the catalog growing at a rate of 21% month over month, and has recent placements in shows and advertisements from companies such as Meta, CBS and HBO.

“We are thrilled to extend our relationship with Downtown Music and its stellar group of brands and services. Their investment is a bona fide industry endorsement of the highest order that Vampr is making all the right noises in our mission to help early stage musicians thrive in a crowded industry,” says Vampr CEO Josh Simons.

“Vampr has carved out an important niche in our industry that fosters connections between music creatives,” said Downtown Chief Commercial Officer, Tracy Maddux. “We see real potential in Vampr as a platform which is why we’ve not only invested, but are bringing our expertise via Found.ee and Songtrust to help them continue to grow.”

Downtown Music Holdings is a global music company, servicing over 23 million music assets across six continents, including some of the most well-known songs in popular music. Their brands power the backend of the music industry with CD Baby, FUGA, Songtrust and Downtown Music Services whose roster includes Hans Zimmer, John Lennon, Miles Davis, Niall Horan, Tori Amos and Wu-Tang Clan. Downtown Neighbouring Rights provides neighbouring rights collection and analytics to empower rights holders to take full advantage of the new digital ecosystem. Clients include Guns N’ Roses, Justin Bieber, Mötley Crüe and OneRepublic, among others.

Known as the ‘LinkedIn for Creatives’, and named by Fast Company as one of the Most Innovative Companies in 2022, Vampr is an online network of creative professionals who are making on average two new connections per session which puts Vampr on par with Facebook’s own connection success rate. Users spend an average 31 minutes on the platform per day, more than 3 times longer than the average LinkedIn session. Their freemium model, complemented by the company’s premium subscription service, Vampr Pro, has recently enjoyed a best-in-class conversion rate approaching 4%.

Read more 👉 https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/downtown-makes-strategic-investment-in-linkedin-for-creatives-vampr/

Introducing Vampr Marketing, a new way to advertise

We are super excited to be launching Vampr Marketing today in partnership with Found.ee.

In a nutshell Vampr Marketing is a brand new tool for artists to promote and build hype around all your latest releases and grow your career. Powered by found.ee’s machine learning technology, our new marketing service will do all the hard work for you to promote your releases on premium websites such as Billboard, Forbes, GQ and Rolling Stone!

We have a self service option where you can build and manage your own campaigns, or, if you want, you can go for the managed ads program, or MAP for short, where our experts will do all the hard work for you. It’s really simple to set up. Just head to the Marketing page at the top of our website and follow the steps.

If you have any trouble, hit up our team as always at [email protected]

Let’s get it 

>> Get Started

Money Money Money. Where can I find revenue?

We all know that the lack of financial support is one of the biggest challenges every emerging and even established musician will face. When you start from nothing, it’s incredibly hard to build. Revenue in the music industry doesn’t always come via traditional routes either. Unlike a part-time or full-time job where you go and work a number of hours and then get paid a fixed rate, musicians more often than not have inconsistent income streams. This makes it harder, but not impossible!

One of the most important things is to make sure you are covering all bases and not losing out on any potential revenue. You need to be totally across all of your financials if you want to be successful in the music industry.

Revenue Checklist for emerging musicians

We have created a revenue checklist, have a look through and see if you are missing any!

☑ Streaming Income

• Every time you release music onto streaming platforms and people listen, this bolsters your royalties.
• Make sure you are across what each platform offers in terms of dollars per stream. Find out where to collect.
• If you have distributed via an online platform, find out whether they can collect these for you and distribute to your account. Many distribution platforms do this.

☑ Publishing Revenue

• Publishing can be an incredible source of income for musicians. You can join a publishing house who will source opportunities for you, or you can submit to platforms like Vampr Publishing with no lock in contracts.
• This can include syncs, songwriting sessions, collaborative songs.

☑ Performances Pay

• This is a very obvious form of revenue for musicians. What is often overlooked is the pay versus the spend. When you accept an offer to perform anywhere, make sure that you are at least breaking even and not losing any money. The best way to do this is to build a budget and calculate all the expenses that the show will entail.
• In your budget make sure you include; support act payment, sound engineer fee, venue hire fee, equipment hire if necessary, marketing fees, press fees, band member payments, travel costs and door person costs. There are certainly more things to include depending on the show, but these are the basics.
• If the payment you are going to receive does not cover what you will spend and unless the opportunity is worth the financial loss – SAY NO!

☑ Performance Royalties

• In certain countries, you can collect performance royalties for every public performance that you complete. Make sure that you identify the overarching body in your country, for example in Australia and New Zealand it is called APRA AAMCOS and you can submit your set lists to collect a sum quarterly. In the UK, this body is called PRS and similarly, you must claim these royalties.
• This includes busking, festival performance, small venues, large venues, cover bands etc.

☑ Mechanical Royalties

• Mechanical royalties are paid in relation to a song’s composition and are owed every time a copy of a musical composition is made.
• Originally, these royalties were paid every time a song was mechanically reproduced as a CD or other physical medium.
• With the rise of digital, mechanical royalties are now generated whenever a composition is streamed or downloaded on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes and Amazon.
• You could be earning additional mechanical royalties on top of your existing royalty payments every time someone plays your song on Spotify.
• Mechanical royalties are paid in relation to the composition of a song (rather than the sound recording), so when someone reproduces and releases your material as a cover version, you’re also owed mechanical royalties.
• Most countries have their own mechanical right society and any mechanical royalties generated in that region are paid to the local society.
• For example, in the US mechanical royalties are collected by Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) and Harry Fox Agency (HFA). While in the UK they’re processed by the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS).

See more examples of societies below:

Australia – AMCOS (in partnership with APRA)
Austria – AUSTRO-MECHANA
Belgium – SABAM
Brazil – UBC
Canada – CMRRA
France – SDRM (in partnership with SACEM)
Germany – GEMA
Mexico – SACM
Netherlands – STEMRA
Italy – SIAE
Japan – JASRAC
Portugal – SPA
Scandinavia – NCB
South Africa – CAPASSO
Spain – SGAE
Switzerland – SUISA
UK – MCPS
USA – MLC and HFA

☑ Commissions

• Sometimes, you will be asked to complete a certain project and you will get paid on commission for this. It may be 10% of the overall project earnings or something different.
• This often acts as a contractor fee and means you have been paid and therefore do not retain any copyright claim to the works.
• Make sure that what you are paid is worth your while! If you are performing on a track that you think will go viral, ask for more money, or better yet, a percentage of the royalties.

☑ Social Media Yield

YouTube

• There are two main ways YouTube can be monetized:

  • 1. Be a YouTube partner – earn revenue from audio and video.

    • To be a partner you need to be approved.
    • You can make money through ad revenue share and subscription revenue.
    • You need 1k subscribers and 4K public watch hours
    • To find out if you are eligible, go to your channel and hit the monetization button on the left.
    • Benefits: earn donations, earn from live streams – super chat and stickers, sell merch, earn from video advertising. You can also monetize your non music content.

  • 2. Collect distribution royalties by delivering releases through a distributor or record label.

    • Content ID needs to match your music, song or recording in UGC videos.
    • This will return to you in the form of copyright royalty.
    • Revenue flows back via label/distributor and then to you.
    • How it works: YouTube only grants content ID to the original owners. YouTube flags copyright and you get a content ID claim notification.
    • Benefits: You don’t have to manage this directly, your label or distributor does. Downside is you do not have full control and unless you have a good partner, you may not see the money as soon as it is available.
• Make sure you apply for an Official Artist Channel. In order to be eligible:
  • • You must own and operate artist channel.
    • Have at least 3 official releases delivered by a label.
    • Have no violations.

TikTok

• It has been statistically proven that TikTok views convert into Spotify streams.
• Virality on TikTok has also led to record label signings and hit songs.
• Building your following and honing your niche on TikTok is well worth it if you have the time to commit.

Facebook

• Facebook does have some monetization features including:
  • Fan subscriptions where you choose the monthly price, fans get exclusive access, content and benefits.
  • FB takes 30% cut + absorbs fee of apple and google.
  • This isn’t the greatest deal.

• Facebook Stars

  • Allows you to monetize livestreams on Facebook.
  • Fans can buy and send virtual stars.
  • Facebook pays creators USD $0.01 for every star.
  • Go to Creator Studio, monetization to see if you are eligible.
  • Eligibility: need to be active for 90 days, proven authentic content.

• Video monetization

  • Have 30k 1 minute views in the last 60 days.
  • Have 10k followers.
  • Be in available country and language.
  • Videos must be at least 1 minute long.

Instagram

• Instagram has a shopping feature that you can integrate into your profile.
• This is a great way to show off your merchandise and let people purchase without leaving the app.
  • Monetize on Instagram while going live
    • Send fans to paypal.me link to receive tips.
    • Remind people they can tip throughout.
    • Drive them to D2C store.
    • Purchase badges during a live video, making their comments more visible as they are marked with hearts.

☑ Merchandise Revenue

• Having apparel, vinyl, CD’s and more is a great way to make money at shows and while you are not performing.
• Have you ever been to a performance where the live show was just so unbelievably incredible that you want something to remember it by? Enter merchandise. This plays on nostalgia, people not wanting to forget the experience and commemorate it by spending money on something they can take home with them. Make sure you utilize this at your shows. Never show up empty handed if possible. Every dollar matters so make sure you leverage this. It is also a great way to go and meet and greet your audience after a show.
• Ensure that you have a website with your merchandise all available online. Even when people cannot attend your shows, they may still want to support you and buying merch is a great way to do this. You can also encourage people to do this on your socials.

☑ Patreon Cash Flow

• If you love making content and want another creative outlet that will pay the bills (hopefully!), platforms like Patreon are where you should go!
• You can make tiered packages for your fans, each higher tier charging a bit more for something extra on your part. This could be a monthly merch package, a special snippet of your songwriting that no one else is privy to or a special message from you to your fans direct.
• Patreon is a great way to get regularity going financially. You can have fans subscribe on a monthly basis and this can help bolster your budgeting for shows where you may not break even but they are still worth playing.

☑ Bandcamp Proceeds

• Bandcamp is another great place to sell your music and merch.
• Bandcamp has a “Bandcamp Friday” on the first Friday of every month and this is where they waive their revenue fees, meaning all of the money goes directly to the artist.
• You can have full control of your Bandcamp and set whatever prices you like. But, at the same time, you have full control of your Bandcamp, which means you need to manage and maintain it. Don’t forget to send out orders as they come in!

☑ Email Marketing revenue

• Email marketing is often overlooked by musicians.
• This is a great way to build a large subscriber base and offer special deals, early bird tickets and insights on where the band is at in their journey.
• The trick to this is keeping it regular so people know when to expect it. Also, hone in on the things that perform well and amend to suit your target audiences. These lists can be used in advertising too to grow your audience further with similar people.

☑ Grants

• Throughout the pandemic, many more grants became available to bolster the music industry in its time of need.
• Many bands relied on these grants for survival.
• You can always look through what grants are available and see if any make sense for you or your career trajectory. Don’t be put off by the application – it is well worth it if you are successful!

☑ Awards

• You don’t need to wait to get nominated for every award. You can nominate yourself or get someone else to nominate you!
• Often the winners receive cash prizes or some sort of recording package.

☑ Donations

• Many musicians are wary of accepting donations. This can often make people feel like they are charity. However, this can also be looked at as an important form of support.
• People would not donate to you or your band if they did not believe in you or want you to succeed.
• The best thing you can do is take their money and put it to good use, don’t waste it!
• Crowdfunding is also an effective way to raise money for a particular goal.

☑ Advances

• Be wary of advances as a form of revenue. They ultimately are just another word for a loan. You have to pay this money back. In this case, it is intrinsically important to have a comprehensive budget to determine whether or not this is a good risk to take.
• You are often locked in for a certain time frame or until you recoup the advance, so you need to think ahead and whether or not this might jeopardise some future goals you have.

Revenue Wrap Up

Remember that there are so many working parts when it comes to revenue for emerging musicians. Don’t get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of places you can source revenue. Work through the checklist one step at a time and then take a breather!

Want to know more about how to manage yourself as a business? Vampr Academy has it all waiting for you. >> Try a 7 day free trial today!

Christmas music is coming… ❄️

Hurry up and submit any music you want distributed before the holiday cut-off dates! It’s getting to that time of year where we start to walk into shops, cafes, grocery stores and hear Christmas Carrols over the sound system. Popular artists are preparing to drop those big Xmas albums or singles that will absolutely dominate radio play and the charts. You want to get in before then, once they drop, unfortunately, you don’t really stand a chance.

Don’t get lost in the noise.

In order to avoid getting lost in the sea of big artists, we recommend that you get your tracks in ASAP or hold off until at least February next year.

It’s time for a break.

Have you noticed that from December to January the music industry gets very quiet? Typically, the music industry shuts down during the holiday period, so make sure if you need to email anyone you do it before December rolls around! Also, don’t be deterred if you don’t get a lot of responses during this time. It’s not personal, people just need a break! Don’t forget to give yourself a break too from time to time. Burn out is a real issue in the music industry. You can’t be creative or share your incredible music with the world if you are not in a good place.

>> Submit your music today with Vampr Publishing

The hottest and latest music releases by emerging Vampr musicians. 🔥

Vampr wants to pay homage to our incredible community. We have so many artists releasing insane music and living their best musical lives – we want to spotlight as many as possible!

If you’re in the mood for some ear food, go listen, follow, and like your fellow Vampr community members. 🙌

1. Tessa Elaina 

Tessa Elaina is a singer/songwriter from Virginia. She composes her songs with guitar, harmonium, piano and looper pedal in her home studio. Tessa is releasing her mastered recordings soon but in the mean time you can enjoy her song Soil & Earth streaming on all platforms.

Listen to Soil & Earth single below:

2. Chad Carlisle 

Chad Carlisle is an Indie Rock Musician and Live Sound Engineer hailing from Los Angeles, California. He has honed his skill in the Live Sound space for the last 10 years working with the likes of Allah Lahs, Regrettes, Morgxn and Blame My Youth, to name a few.

Listen to Time Capsule album below:

3. Emanuel Brown 

As a native to Newport News, Virginia and now resident of the greater Seattle area, Emanuel draws in inspiration from experiences while growing up there. In a career and genre where authenticity is vital to success, E. Brown‘s sound is an embodiment and personification of the lates 80’s and early 90’s entwined with new-age intensity, uniqueness and rawness.

With vast years of musical expertise, independent artist Emanuel Brown identifies and resonates with the Hip-Hop and R&B community. E. Brown has been fortunate to work with well respected artists in the industry and is always looking to improve his skill set as a lyricist and singer he has dropped two albums, two EP’s and a slew of singles to show his commitment to his craft.

In 2021 Emanuel was fortunate enough to chart four times on the iTunes Charts in Japan & Africa for carious songs. As well as being placed on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” playlist in February of 2022! The Virginia product has also released his newest single Don’t Stop which is one of his proudest works thus far.

Listen to Don’t Stop single below:

4. Casey Cavaliere 

A Philadelphia-based musician, producer, mixer, and songwriter. As guitarist and founding member of The Wonder Years, Casey has enjoyed an exciting career recording and has toured extensively around the world.

Currently, Casey is doing an EU tour but when he’s not touring you can find him front and center on his podcast “The Record Process.” We’ll be doing our Accelerator Session with Casey this November, talking touring, production, helping artists define their sound and brand and how to grow as an artist.

Listen to the latest episode below:

5. WolfStang 

Wolfstang is part wolf, all ‘stang. A hit maker. Shape shifter. She’s been a waitress, a student, a loner, a clown. A producer, a CEO, the wannabe queen around town. “We’ve all got scars. I just got tired of hiding mine.” – Wolfstang

Listen to her latest EP below:

Was that not sweet music to your ears? We couldn’t get enough. Go and connect and say hi to these artists, they are all on Vampr and smashing it!

If you have music that’s ready for distribution or publishing, you can also submit it via Vampr! You never know, your next sync might be waiting for you around the corner. 👀

Submit your track to Vampr Publishing today >> Click here
Submit your track for Vampr Distribution today >> Click here