Jaxsta Goes Dark: Vinyl Group Ends Public Access to 355M Credits
By Trevor Loucks
Founder & Lead Developer, Dynamoi
The music industry’s most ambitious attempt to solve its metadata crisis has officially gone dark. As of Wednesday, December 17, Vinyl Group (ASX: VNL) placed Jaxsta into "hibernation," ceasing public access and API services for the world's largest database of official music credits.
For nearly a decade, Jaxsta positioned itself as the "IMDb of music," aggregating over 355 million credits from 366 partners including major labels and distributors. Its closure marks a critical failure in the sector's efforts to monetize metadata transparency. While Vinyl Group retains the technology stack, the removal of public access strips millions of producers, engineers, and session musicians of their primary verified digital resume.
A data scaling trap
Management’s rationale was stark: high-quality metadata is essential for operations but brutal to monetize as a standalone product. CEO Josh Simons noted that despite cost-reduction efforts, the model simply could not scale commercially. The platform faced a classic "free rider" problem:
- Labels provided data for free but had little incentive to pay to view their own assets.
- DSPs like Spotify already ingest data directly via DDEX feeds.
- Creatives viewed credit attribution as a right rather than a premium service worth a monthly subscription.
Maintaining real-time ingestion pipelines for 355 million credits requires enterprise-grade infrastructure. Without a government mandate—unlike The MLC in the US—Jaxsta could not bridge the gap between high overhead and low-margin SaaS subscriptions.
Media assets take over
This move cements Vinyl Group's pivot from a music-tech utility to a media and commerce conglomerate. Following a rebranding from Jaxsta Ltd in 2023, the company has aggressively acquired consumer-facing assets. The resource allocation now clearly favors:
- The Brag Media: Publisher of Rolling Stone and Variety in Australia, driving scalable ad revenue.
- Vinyl.com: An e-commerce retail play tapping into the physical format resurgence.
- Vampr: A social networking app with 1.3 million users, though it now loses its competitive edge of verified profile credits.
Key insight: The industry pays for new insights (like AI tagging), not just a cleaner view of existing data. Vinyl Group is cutting its losses on utility to double down on attention and retail.
Verified credits vanish
The immediate casualty is transparency. Jaxsta was the only public database that verified credits against official label data, serving as a check against the crowdsourced errors common on Discogs or Wikipedia. Its absence reopens the "black box" of data that often leads to unallocated royalties.
For the backend of the industry, this complicates dispute resolution. Creatives previously used Jaxsta Pro links to prove their participation on tracks to PROs. Now, the industry effectively reverts to PDF discographies and unverified web pages, making the audit trail for session musicians and engineers significantly murkier.
Strategic takeaways
The "hibernation" of Jaxsta offers a sober lesson on the limits of B2B music tech. For professionals navigating this shift, three immediate actions apply:
- Archive everything: Creatives should immediately download any available data. Do not rely on third-party platforms as a primary resume.
- Expect disputes: Labels should anticipate an uptick in manual credit verification requests from artist teams.
- Watch the ticker: Investors should monitor if shedding this cost center stabilizes Vinyl Group's path to its $25 million revenue goal for FY2026. If the media division thrives without the data anchor, the pivot will be vindicated.
About the Editor
Trevor Loucks is the founder and lead developer of Dynamoi, where he focuses on the convergence of music business strategy and advertising technology. He focuses on applying the latest ad-tech techniques to artist and record label campaigns so they compound downstream music royalty growth.
