Our Roadshow residency at The Viper Room has now hit the halfway point. Our May Marathon has seen countless bands and musicians come together to play on stage well past midnight every Monday. It honestly might be one of the most fun experiences we’ve ever been apart of.

And there’s still two weeks to go! We’d love to catch you there, give you a t-shirt or watch you tear it up on stage. And remember… it’s free 🔥

For those of you not in LA or unable to attend we have cut together a video of the first two weeks:

We have updated our Privacy Policy in preparation for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) later this month. We value your privacy, as fellow internet users, and believe that the additional transparency required by European law can only be a good thing, irrespective of where you live.

Your experience using Vampr’s services will not change. We are giving you more information so that you can better understand how we collect and use your personal information and what your rights are in relation to the personal data we have collected.

Vampr collects and processes your personal information in order to provide and operate our services. We may also collect and process your data for research which helps us improve our services and keep our users safe on Vampr. In order to do so, we may disclose your information to third parties. Where possible, Vampr will aggregate and/or make anonymous your personal information so that it cannot be used to identify you. You can withdraw your consent or object to us processing your personal information at any time by contacting support@vampr.me.

We will collect the following personal information in order to provide you with access to and use of our services and for the purposes outlined above:

If you choose to provide Vampr with the following personal information, we may process it for the purposes outlined above:

You have the right to ask Vampr if and how your personal information is being processed and to request a copy of the personal information you have provided. You also have the right to have your personal data erased and in some circumstances, to object to having your personal information processed.

Without your explicit consent, we will not process data that may reveal certain personal information such as your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions and religious or philosophical beliefs.

You are able to access and amend much of your personal data by logging into your account. This allows you to ensure that your personal information remains up to date and rectify any inaccurate personal information.

For further information please review our updated Privacy Policy.

This one belongs to our entire community:

We are beyond excited to anounce the launch today of Vampr in English, Español, 中文, Français, Italiano, 日本語, Português, Pусский and Türkçe.

In addition, we have released an important update to our algorithm which drastically improves the quality of results and potential connections we suggest to you.

We anticipate the network effect of these two updates to be profound. As we soar past 300,000 users, it’s important that the accuracy and quality of connections we suggest to you are more relevant than ever.

It is equally important that we open up our service to folks who don’t speak English as a first language.

We’ve been working on these updates for some time and are really keen to hear from you if you spot any errors or bugs. Please contact us at support@vampr.me. Please also note that support is currently limited to English.

This weekend the Vampr Roadshow made two stops including a jaunt across the pacific as we went from Sydney, Australia to San Jose, CA.

We were blown away by the reception and turnout — the Vampr community truly keeps growing larger, stronger and more connected.

For those of you who have missed our Instagram story feed on the days of each event, we’ve cut together some short videos, including last month’s New York pit stop.

See you in May, Los Angelinos!

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 ✌️