RootMusic Raises $16 Million Second Round, Following Hit BandPage Facebook App for Musicians

RootMusic has led a movement of musicians and fans onto Facebook over the past year. Now it's building on its market position, announcing a second round of $16 million today. Over the last twelve months, its BandPage application has grown from around 3 million monthly active users and 150,000 daily active users to 32.4 million MAU and 1.56 million DAU, according to our AppData tracking service. On Facebook, it is by far the largest Page app for musicians, and the seventh-largest app overall. By some measures, it is now bigger than long-time leading music fan site MySpace. The company says that the money will be used for "expansion" without really saying how it will be used -- but clearly, to go after a bigger opportunity. The platform, Facebook, has been growing quickly in recent years and now has 750 million people on the site every month. The demand that all these users have for quality Page experiences around musicians has almost certainly not been met yet. Meanwhile, long-time top music destination MySpace has fallen to the tens of millions of users from its heyday, with Compete showing it at under 30 million in the US, and Quantcast showing under 20 million. The app also has a premium-service business model. The free version provides what you'd expect from a Page management application designed for music: a music player, a video section, a store for buying music, a tour calendar, and ways to post songs and other information to Facebook and Twitter. Page owners who want to get more interface customization options have to pay. The company has, by the looks of this promotional video, signed up many of the most popular acts in the world over the years, from a variety of older acts like The Doors and Bon Jovi to top new ones like Rihanna and Taylor Swift. It says it has more than 250,000 bands overall. So far, RootMusic seems to have carved out the music category of Pages well. It has been steadily rolling out product upgrades over the past couple of years, while some of the other companies we've seen approach the market head in other directions or lose focus. It could, however, theoretically get more competition from any in-house music service that Facebook might decide to roll out, and in the form of streaming music services like Spotify attracting the attention of fans. New investor GGV Capital (formerly Granite) led the round, with another new investor, Northgate Capital coming in to participate. Mohr Davidow Ventures also added on to its existing $2.3 million first round.

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RootMusic Raises $16 Million Second Round, Following Hit BandPage Facebook App for Musicians

Eric Eldon

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