VL Group Company History
The company history of VL Group has been a long and incredible journey. For over two decades we have been bringing music to the masses via our patented technology. From humble beginnings to working with the world's largest brands, you can learn all about our journey here.
Expertise
Our team of music industry and computer science experts have vast levels of experience helping customers just like you deliver world class business applications.
Trust
We have provided services and built trust with some of the largest brands in the world. We've even had a client's ad shown during The Big Game!
Passion
We are always working diligently to add new features and tools to our system to ensure you always get the highest quality service possible.
How it Started
For an historical perspective, in April 2003, Apple launched its iTunes Music Store which produced a seismic shift in the emergent 'digital revolution' then taking place. Soon, iTunes cornered the market and became the first such digital service to secure agreements with all the major record labels, and by July 2005, had sold 500 million tracks by means of digital downloads.
Back then, brands were spending hundreds of billions of dollars on marketing and consumer engagement, but were just learning how to navigate the internet's vast expanse with its potentially massive new opportunity—given the exploding growth of digital music being delivered through mobile devices.
On September 30, 2003, Vervelife was founded. Our early team coined the phrase 'the intersection of bands and brands'. With that, we set about creating marketing campaigns based on experiences that would bring music fans and consumers together with brands looking to market and sell products. We delivered end-to-end digital promotion that enabled brands to instantly engage and reward their customers via branded web and mobile experiences. We believe we were the first to use 'pin codes' as the download mechanism, thereby setting in motion that new market possibility for brand-to-consumer engagement.
Our primary objectives were to complete development of our proprietary technology platform, Rhymba™, develop music label relationships, and secure leading brands as customers.
About the same time, AppliedSB was founded. They procured licensing agreements with the major labels and many independents. With those relationships, they delivered a range of ancillary technology products and services designed to facilitate digital downloads. They were focused, like VerveLife, on business to business sales while facilitating consumer engagement and loyalty for its business clients through the use of digital content.
First enterprise client
In 2005, VerveLife had a major client win with Anheuser-Busch's Michelob Ultra brand, which was a sponsor of the Chicago Marathon. They gave away thousands of cards at their tent to fans and participants. The cards contained a code that allowed access to a micro site experience that included MP3 downloads.
From there we moved to producing exclusive content and securing high-profile deals which over the next few years included artists such as Rihanna, The Plain White T's, Smashing Pumpkins, Enrique Iglesias, Brad Paisley, even Taylor Swift—and the list goes on.
Over the next six-year period, Vervelife became a multi award-winning music marketing agency, garnering well-deserved respect as a niche market leader in the music promotional marketing sector.
Major Milestones
Applied.SB won Musictoday LLC, and they remain a key client today. Musictoday uses our APIs to provide downloads to their users for the specific artists they support on their site. We also upload their own artist content for their users to download through the Musictoday website.
Applied.SB also won IMVU ('Instant Messaging Virtual Universe') as a major account and they remain so today.
IMVU allows their users to download music through their store. Users are also able to create playlists in the IMVU music store. These playlists are loaded into the user's virtual room and can be played in any room with two or more users. IMVU operates primarily in the US, Canada, the UK, France and Brazil.
In 2010, Applied.SB won Rockbot as a key client. Rockbot uses our APIs to search our catalog and build playlists for their clients. Their clients stream the playlists in gyms, bars, stores, and restaurants. Rockbot remains a valued client of VL Group.
VL Group is Trusted By
Top 100 Technology Companies in North America
Vervelife was named one of the "Top 100 Technology Companies in North America" by Red Herring Magazine, a major tech publication with global distribution that highlighted startup companies and private ventures in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. It was a big deal, as the feat had been shared by notables such as Google, Skype, and PayPal.
The first mass download model
Over the next several years, Vervelife made music-centric experiences for brands that sought music ideas but lacked the domain expertise to implement them.
We quickly earned a reputation as a smart and innovative company—using music to drive metrics that mattered to brands. We earned dozens of creative and innovation awards and were credited with creating the first mass download model. This opened up content delivery to hundreds of millions of consumers via brand promotions, something that was prohibitively expensive up until then.
Acquisitions
In April of 2011, AppliedSB was acquired. Together we had technology, label relationships, and creativity. Applied.SB's strength was in its technology and operations. Their robust technology platform was able to deliver a broad and expansive array of products and services (web, social network, mobile solutions) using music, video, and other digital assets.
The content catalog and existing client base was attractive to Vervelife. The content catalog meant faster implementations of digital content solutions for clients (as the existing catalog and technology could service multiple clients at the same time) and AppliedSB's recurring revenue from long term clients provided a good balance to the high value project work for brands.
Patents
Beginning in March 2012 (and still continuing), VL Group has made a targeted investment in what has resulted in U.S. Patent No. 9,270,724 (issued February 23, 2016) and U.S. Patent No. 9,621,609 (issued April 11, 2017), both titled "System and Method for Content Streaming with Feature Detection" (and now called 'SmartStreamTM').
A continuation application was filed in the United States Patent and Trademark Office on April 6, 2017, and was assigned Serial Number 15/480,654, allowing for patent updates.
As our platform has evolved, VL Group has continued to enhance it's technology designed to serve its client base. Many of these enhancements have streamlined the ability for clients to utilize digital content and also have developed more fundamental capabilities designed to facilitate the effective use of digital content. Our patented technology allows clients to stream music securely on mobile devices without the need to develop a mobile app. This allows clients to embed music into their existing mobile platform with little to no development, and without the need to submit their mobile platform to the time consuming approval process required for other music implementations by both Apple and Google.
Winner of multiple prestigious awards while engaging hundreds of high-profile and world-class artists
By then, we had worked with a diverse customer base including many Fortune 500 companies.
Brands that had used our marketing promotion services on several occasions include General Mills, PepsiCo (Quaker), Kellogg's, Schick and Crown Imports (Corona).
Without question, over this time period, we had overcome the challenge of market acceptance and had satisfied the needs of a broad range of clients by providing them with critical solutions through the 'power of music' to promote their products. In doing so, we won multiple prestigious awards while engaging many high-profile and world-class artists.
With streaming on the rise, a valuable opportunity presented itself to us which led to the decision for us to focus on our streaming services for our technology clients.
