BandLab, the free social music creation platform, now reaches 100 million users.
There’s not trumpet-blowing for the mobile app’s major milestone. The news is shared by way of a report written by Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman, who caught up with BandLab’s Singapore-based CEO Meng Ru Kuok for a chat on growth and its future.
The U.S. accounts for around 30% of BandLab’s users, he said, and is its largest market.
“It’s funny when you get to these large milestones, especially something like 100 million, which is slightly hard to fathom in terms of the scale of the number,” he tells the news title. “It was also something that really felt like nothing really special. It sort of crossed, and I think we all realized, like, ‘Oh, that’s great.’ But I think that’s just the result of how fast things have grown.”
Just last year, the platform boasted over 60 million-plus registered users, nearly 40% of whom were women, up from 50 million-plus in 2022.
BandLab’s music-making software includes an arsenal of virtual instruments, as well as the ability to automatically generate multipart vocal harmonies, record, sample and manipulate sound in myriad ways. The service can also distribute music to streaming services, and it incorporates components of a social network: Musicians can create individual profiles, chat with one another, comment on their peers’ releases, solicit advice or break up a song into its component pieces and share those to crowdsource remixes.
A major commercial breakthrough was delivered with d4vd’s “Romantic Homicide,” which the then 17-year-old Houston native created in July 2022 using BandLab. The brooding, guitar-hooked track caught fire on TikTok, d4vd (pronounced “David”) signed to Interscope, the song peaked at No. 45 on the Billboard Hot 100, and he landed on the bill for Coachella 2023.
“Seeing artists go on to major labels and independent labels is a great, great joy and success for us,” Meng continues. “Our relationship with an artist doesn’t end when they progress in the industry.”
BandLab was founded in 2015, and doesn’t receive royalties from music made on its platform. Instead, the company makes money on artist services (which include distribution, livestreaming and BandLab Boost) that allow acts to turn their profiles or postings into ads on the platform to better reach users.