Last month, former Universal digital boss Rob Wells signed up to the Advisory Board of Revelator, joining the likes of Island founder Chris Blackwell and Tom Ryan, the former Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy and Development at EMI.
What is Revelator? Essentially a cloud-based platform that provides sales and marketing intelligence to independent businesses and artists, who can subscribe via a monthly payment.
According to Wells, Revelator – which recently entered into a long-term partnership with CD Baby – can particularly help independent publishers and labels demystify their accounting and analytics.
“There’s a bit of a vacuum in the industry at the moment following the acquisition of NextBigSound [by Pandora] and MusicMetric [by Apple], as well as some elements of The Echo Nest [acquired by Spotify], in the data and analysis space,” Wells told MBW.
He added: “This isn’t just aimed at Universal – it’s any big corporate, whether in recordings, publishing, live, ticketing, whatever: Revelator benefits from being specialists in doing just one thing.They can move very quickly, and develop elements of the platform on the fly.
“Whether it’s a new streaming service or another new technology, a company like Revelator can focus [on accommodating]; they’re not distracted by anything else.
“Every new innovation that comes along, Revelator can provide a solution for it. That’s potentially explosive for independent businesses.
“Revelator is potentially positioned to provide is a solution for everybody outside the big labels and big publishers in each market around the planet. The scale of that opportunity is pretty big.”
Established in 2013, Revelator integrates sales and marketing alongside reporting and analytics for subscribers.
Ollie Buckwell, Revelator’s Global Head of Business Development, told MBW: “Real music people understand the businesses today is complicated.
“Between our advisers and management team, we’ve got something like 150 years in the music business between us. That understanding of the music industry and knowing that Revelator can solve so many of those issues is what made us so attractive to music folks [like Wells and Blackwell].”
He added: “We’re totally solving a problem for independents. Merlin has been a great asset for the independents in terms of representing labels and getting the deals done. Then folks like Consolidated Independent and FUGA have stepped in to provide great delivery services. That means independents have then been left with a lot of data coming back from the various services; we provide that piece of the puzzle.”
Wells suggested that Revelator’s future could mean expanding into other media businesses.
“Revelator could work in books, films – any industry that has data coming in and requires a platform to ingest it and present it in an understandable way.”
Music Business Worldwide
