Top-Ranking Social Music Making App Developer Smule Acquires Khush
Leading mobile developers join forces to redefine the $65B market for musical entertainment
Palo Alto, California, December 1, 2011 - Smule, creators of top-ranking social music making apps including Magic Piano™, Ocarina, I Am™ T-Pain, Glee Karaoke, and MadPad™, announced today that it has acquired Khush, an intelligent music app developer and creator of popular apps, Songify and LaDiDa™. The acquisition, a combined cash and stock deal which closed this week, brings together complimentary visions, technologies and teams.
"The Khush team brings world-class innovation, unique technological talent, and a passionately shared vision for the future," said Jeffrey C. Smith, co-founder and CEO of Smule. "Joining forces with Khush represents the next step in our plan to bring accessible, fun, and sometimes bizarre music making experiences to everyone."
Smule and Khush are leading innovators in the rapidly growing market for mobile entertainment. Together, the companies' customers have downloaded nearly 30 million apps and created more than 350 million songs. Combined, Smule and Khush experienced more than 500% user growth over the past 12 months.
"Our goal is to make musical self-expression as ubiquitous as social expression is today," said Prerna Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Khush. "The success of apps like Songify and Magic Piano has brought to bear our belief that all humans are inherently creative, and we are thrilled to be uniting with Smule in our common quest for a musical utopia."
• Songify (Khush), a top ranked app with more than 5 million downloads, magically creates songs from a user's spoken words, allowing you to Songify everyday aspects of your life, including perhaps your love of pets such as cats or even a skirmish with police.
• Ocarina (Smule) downloaded more than 6 million times, converts your phone into a flute-like instrument, sensitive to your breath, touch, and tilt.
• Magic Piano™ (Smule), downloaded more than 6 million times, allows everyone ranging from a toddler to a Juilliard grad to earn scores by playing their favorite songs, spanning from Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" to Beethoven's Pathetique sonata. Magic Piano users collectively play more than 1 million songs a day, striking 25 million notes per hour on average.
"The market for musical entertainment has changed dramatically since the arrival of Apple's iPhone just over three years ago," Smith continued. "People are looking for more than MP3 downloads and streams; instead, they want interactive, immersive, and social experiences. By combining with our friends at Khush, we have the opportunity to emerge as a principal actor redefining the $65B market for musical entertainment."
Both companies share deep academic roots. Dr. Ge Wang, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Smule, is an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Dr. Parag Chordia, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Khush, is a professor of computer music at Georgia Tech and serves as the director of the Georgia Tech Music Intelligence Lab.
The Khush team will remain in Atlanta, GA, will continue to function as an independent studio under the Khush brand, and will increasingly leverage Smule's Sonic Network, a social fabric allowing users to create and explore music together.
When NewsCred relaunched in January, TechCrunch called it ”The Ning for Newspapers” as it allowed users to create a combination news aggregation and opinion site, like your very own The Huffington Post. NewsCred has had several pivots in its three years of existence, but now it’s solely focused on B2B licensing deals and tirelessly helping to connect the dots between brands and online publishers.
“We’ve completley pivoted the company around. Now, we’re launching our next generation newswire. We’re helping publishers and brands get access to amazing content. Right now, their only option is going to AP or Reuters. We want our service to disrupt the industry,” says NewsCred’s Founder and CEO Shafqat Islam.
Let’s say Coca-Cola wants to run a series about music. Through NewsCred, Coca-Cola would have access to sources like Billboard.com, MTV News, The L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune as well as smaller music blogs. Revenue from the Coca-Cola deal is then split amongst the news sources in that package. Content producers don’t have to pay for anything; they simply receive a check at the end of the month. Islam says providers are making 6 figures a year off of NewsCred’s service and the company is on track to pay a few million dollars in syndication fees in 2012. “Content creators produce amazing journalism and they’re looking for non-display revenue. It’s a nice source of additional, incremental revenue,” he says.
Through NewsCred, the publisher or the blog also gains exposure, distribution and the company gets paid. Another New York City based startup named Contently is solving similar problems by helping brands outsource high-quality content from individual writers. Contently wants to put an end to content farms like Demand Media. Check out our launch story on the company here.
For brands and publishers, NewsCred charges a monthly API licensing fee for access to its content. The fee is based on the volume of news stories as well as the sources licensed. Content is customized, tailored and monetized through new advertising opportunities making it sound like a win-win. For larger publishers with a high volume of pageviews, NewsCred guarantees revenues. It’s an opportunity for big brand companies to save money on hiring a full-blown marketing staff or in-house editorial team while still positioning themselves as thought leaders in an industry.
“We’ve created a single platform for the world’s best journalism. And in doing so, we’re delivering millions of dollars of revenue back into the news ecosystem, and helping an important industry find new models to not just survive, but thrive.”
-NewsCred’s Founder and CEO Shafqat Islam (pictured below)
NewsCred raised a $750K seed round in September 2010 from Floodgate, IA Ventures and Naval Ravikant followed by a $4M Series A round in October 2011, led by FirstMark, with participation from Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and Advancit Capital (Shari Redstone) and participation from existing investors.
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