SONGTRADR BUYS MUSIC LICENSING AGENCY BIG SYNC MUSIC IN MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR DEAL
Santa Monica-based music licensing platform Songtradr has acquired creative music licensing agency Big Sync Music Ltd.
The acquisition was a multi-million dollar cash and equity transaction and resulted in Big Sync’s co-founder, Unilever Ventures, the venture capital arm of Unilever, exiting and becoming a minority shareholder in Songtradr.
Headquartered in London, with an APAC-focused team in Singapore and a North/South America-focused team in New York, Big Sync is the largest global music buyer of its kind.
Music is sourced for local, regional and worldwide advertising campaigns on behalf of well-known brands, from Dove, Knorr, Magnum and AXE to Johnnie Walker, Samsung, Amazon and Lipton.
Big Sync says that it will continue to provide independent music supervision, composition, licensing and rights management services to its blue-chip clients.
Songtradr is a music licensing and distribution platform established by tech entrepreneur Paul Wiltshire in 2014 and officially launched in 2016.
The company is described as the only fully-automated, open music licensing marketplace in the world, with over 400,000 artists and catalogs from 190+ countries, developing real-time data intelligence, such as the utilization of streaming and social metadata to guide the licensing experience.
Songtradr founder and CEO, Paul Wiltshire, said: “Big Sync’s global footprint working with major international brands combined with Songtradr’s technology and our growing community of artists, creates an unparalleled music licensing solution for all parties.”
Big Sync CEO and co-founder, Dominic Caisley, added: “Leveraging Songtradr’s technology, we are now able to augment our services with streamlined access to a larger community of high quality music talent.
“Songtradr’s data and technology infrastructure also allows Big Sync to match a brand’s target product audience with data-matched selections of music.
“Combining this data intelligence with our teams’ music supervision experience is a game changer and will provide our clients a more efficient and transparent service.”
In June 2018 Songtradr launched a tool for artists to distribute their music to over 200 streaming and download services at once.