Vampr Publishing 2.0 is here! 👀

Vampr Publishing was officially announced in May 2020 and was always designed to be disruptive.

• Disruptive in the sense we want more independent artists getting access to sync opportunities.
• Disruptive in the sense we want to compete with the biggest sync libraries in existence, but in a way that provides a huge selection of diverse original music for Music Supervisors and Creative Producers in the most efficient way possible.

We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but we’re not doing what everybody else in the sync industry are doing.

We’ve positioned ourselves as an enablement for independent artists with commercial catalogues to compete more effectively with library/production/stock music.

The concept of Vampr Publishing started when we realised we have over a million music-making users on our app, a number that only ever gets bigger, and their individual catalogues only ever get bigger too.

That means two things to us:

1. Artists need help being represented for sync. Especially in this DIY era where artists already have to look after extensive highly-demanding record releases and their promotion/marketing.

2. We have a very unique opportunity as a partner with those who need to use licensed music. A never-ending, exponential-growth, diverse catalogue and extremely easy mobile submission system that helps quality control, metadata management and reduces friction to the sync market.

We launched the first version of Vampr Publishing in the app and watched 10s of thousands of artists submit over 50,000 songs to be considered in a record-breaking amount of time.

Meanwhile, we quickly onboarded interest from a network of over 300 music supervisors, sync partners and a publishing admin partner.

Launching during the pandemic was both a blessing and curse. A curse because the sync industry was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic (filming stopped). And a blessing because it allowed us to take a macro view of the sync industry, where it’s struggling and where our strengths lay.

Some Important Things We’ve Learnt From Vampr Publishing 1.0

Too much/the wrong information being submitted is not helpful to anybody

We’ve had to find a careful balance of exactly what information is important to help a track get sync attention and being the most user-friendly mobile sync submission system available.

Some music is more sync-friendly than other

There’s a saying in sync that there’s a “home for any song”, but the reality is that there are trends, preferences and standards. We’ve invested more and more attention and energy into research in this respect to ensure we’ve got what Music Supervisors need.

Human interaction at the wrong stages of the submission process is deceptively not helpful to anybody

We’re always cautious with automation and being “just an app”, not a team behind it, but this operation called for more effective systems to ensure artists aren’t being left in the dark about the status of their submission, and in this instance, removing people from some stages of submission and introducing better technology allows us to be much more efficient with communications and status updates.

The sync market just doesn’t work without very granular metadata tags

There are always multiple stakeholders involved with what music is chosen for sync, and way back at the pitching and searching stages specifically, music is being searched for with an obscure “theme” language. To be prepared for these searches, operations need to be based around that language.

At this scale, music and metadata needs to be managed with technology

Systems, even those used as standard in the music industry, just aren’t well-prepared for dealing with bulk (read: mass) quantities of metadata. We tried our best to work within our initial means, but eventually we realised that we weren’t going to be able to achieve our vision without technical intervention.

Urgent end-of-day turnaround search normality isn’t the kind of behaviour you’d see in FTSE companies outside of the creative industry and needs disrupting

Nobody seems to want to say it but… Last minute rushing is because somebody, somewhere in the procurement process, is disorganised. This would not be practical in most business situations, and it only is in sync because “it’s the way it’s always been.”

We want to make the music industry more lucrative, so we have to start behaving like more lucrative businesses. Therefore, we’re going to do our bit to ensure we’re organised and ready when a search comes in. Reactive chasing should not be the standard.

How you organise and categorise music ready for searches is extremely important. How you make sure music is being distributed into that organisational environment is equally so

Following above; we’re committed to organisation. Making sure we’ve got what’s needed and know where to find it quickly and efficiently is our overarching strategy.

Partners matter

Getting syncs is all about distributing music as far and wide as possible to reach opportunities through routes of relationships.

What’s New in Vampr Publishing 2.0?

• A whole new, revised submission system built to support submitting music and data tags in a way that increases chances of a song being syncd, starting from an easy mobile submission from our app
• Better explanations of why things are needed for sync, and where to get them, through the submission process
• An easier way to tell us songwriter splits
• A whole new Tags & Metadata screen that allows artists to tell us EXACTLY how a song should be used in sync, without having to fiddle around with ID3s or spreadsheets
• Drastically improved submission status notification in the app
• A whole new desktop submission system to provide all deliverables necessary in one screen
• Improved sync chances
• Potential special creative roster artist projects

We are absolutely buzzing for this next stage in Vampr Publishing and can’t wait to help more of you with your sync efforts! 🚀📽