Music biz welcomes Jaxsta’s decision to waive ‘Pro’ subscription fee for 2020 due to COVID-19

Jaxsta is giving back to the music community by unlocking its top-tier platform, Jaxsta Pro, and waving the fee for the rest of the year.

The initiative is intended as a tonic to the “unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on the music industry globally,” reads a statement via the Australian Stock Exchange, and has broad support from across the industry, including ARIA, AIR and Merlin.

As a result, the official music credits specialist no longer expects to receive revenue from its B2B subscription service in the calendar year 2020. Instead, Jaxsta will focus on “gaining valuable insights about how different segments of the music industry interact with the product from an increased user base and will make improvements to its subscription-based product using those findings,” the ASX statement continues.

Jaxsta logo

Jaxsta Pro, which has been described as the IMDB or LinkedIn of the music community, launched last November carrying an annual price tag of US$150 (or a discounted rate of US$120).

Giving industry professionals free access to Jaxsta Pro is the company’s way of supporting the music community through these challenging times, says Jaxsta CEO and co-founder Jacqui Louez Schoorl.

“When this cloud lifts and creatives are properly able to get back to work,” she comments, users “will have a tool ready to help them get hired again or promote recent and upcoming projects.”

Jaxsta’s statement, issued early Thursday, features voices from across the music industry, including artists Questlove and Rita Wilson, Grammy-winning engineer John Hanes, and leading executives based in the U.K. and U.S.

“During these challenging times,” comments Jeremy Sirota, CEO of Merlin, the independents’ digital rights agency, “Merlin is pleased to support this initiative on behalf of our members and their artists. Jaxsta offers fans a unique window into the people behind the recordings by providing accurate attribution. Music lovers can now discover and learn more about the engineers, producers, mixers and others that contribute to the music.”

Jacqui Louez Schoorl and Dean Ormston

Dean Ormston, CEO, APRA AMCOS adds: “Jaxsta is a champion of music creators, whether high profile, emerging, or behind-the-scenes, and this premium offer to music industry professionals will undoubtedly open up new opportunities for creators to connect, to be discovered and to be further acknowledged for their work.”

Today, the company boasts upwards of 30 data partnerships with labels, publishers, royalty agencies and industry associations worldwide, which give the company access to metadata from hundreds of thousands of labels and publishers representing more than 90% of the world’s music market.

Its database tops 105 million official credits, 42 million individual web pages, 27 million unique recordings credits, 10 million profiles, and 1.8 million artists’ credits. Some 100,000 new credits are ingested into the system each day.

Pitched as a type of digital armory for industry professionals, the Pro product promises more content, charts and data that you didn’t realise you needed.

Jaxsta was founded in 2015, and by the end of 2018 it was officially listing on the Australian Securities Exchange under the code ‘JXT.

Click here to register to Jaxsta Pro.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.