Los Angeles-based Live Nation Labs has acquired social music recommendation startup Rexly and will use Rexly’s founding team to expand its reach to San Francisco. Rexly’s co-founder and CEO Joel Resnicow, as well as co-founder and CTO Kyle Fleming, will head Live Nation Labs North, which will primarily focus on mobile development. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Fleming and Resnicow announced the acquisition with a post on Rexly’s blog, which read in part:
“Rexly is joining forces with Live Nation Labs first and foremost because of shared values and vision. We are all lean entrepreneurs. We obsess over user-driven design and data-driven decision making. Most important, we are deeply committed to creating phenomenal experiences for music fans, nurturing the music tech community and breathing new life into a challenged industry.”
Rexly launched a little more than a year ago with an iOS app that makes it possible to instantly share and discover new music. “Rexly is stepping in where Apple has failed with Ping,” our own Ryan Kim wrote when it launched in May 2011 — and the success of the app apparently appealed to the folks at Live Nation Labs as well. “With team Rexly we continue to recruit the people who inspire us,” LiveNation.com GM Eric Garland wrote Monday in a separate blog post, adding: “The people we try to imitate and flatter on our best days.”
Live Nation Labs was founded when the ticketing giant acquired Garland’s media intelligence start-up BigChampagne in December, and the R&D offshoot has been on a hiring spree ever since, bringing high-profile talent like former Warner Bros. SVP of Emerging Technologies Ethan Kaplan and former Billboard social music mastermind Kyle Bylin into the fold.
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