Josh Simons.
Josh Simons, aged 35, a songwriter, indie band player and tech entrepreneur, is at first glance an unlikely candidate to be building a serious emerging media empire, initially aimed at youth.
In his current gig as CEO of Vinyl Group, he has been steadily buying bolt-on media businesses for his music-based portfolio of publications for the ASX-listed company.
The collective network now reaches about 10 million Australians each month, with the owned and operated portion accounting for a million of that.
The high energy acquisition march has taken the company well beyond music and entertainment.
Vinyl in February of 2023 acquired Vampr and Josh Simons was appointed CEO in June that same year.
Last year Vinyl.com expanded to the UK and the company closed a $8 million deal for premium youth publisher Brag Media, which also licences titles Rolling Stone and Variety in Australia and New Zealand. Then it bought Serenade and Funkified.
Capital raising, via an entitlements offer, secured the funds for the acquisition of digital city guide Concrete Playground which has a cash component of $3.5 million to be paid in the current March quarter.
Last month Vinyl closed an exclusive licensing and representation agreement with Refinery29, a global women-focused lifestyle media brand.
And watch this space. Vinyl is open to more M&A if the price is right.
“I dropped out of school at 17 to start a film production company, sold that later, started a band, got fairly well known in Australia, and then started an app in America and sold that to what was called Jaxsta (Australia-based database of official music credits) and is now Vinyl Group,” he told AdNews.
“One step leads to the next step, to the next step, and suddenly you look back, you go, ‘Oh, I'm the CEO of a public company’.”
He sees the skills with the band, Buchanan, similar to running a company.
“I was the front man of the band,” he said. “I was a songwriter. I was also the label head and the publisher, so I had to do a lot of the business and the spreadsheet stuff back then.
“What I do today with running publishing and the tech companies, and everything that Vinyl Group does, it's all just people management.
“It’s about making sure you're surrounded by the best people who, in their specialty, know more than you do.
“You don't want to be the smartest guy in the room in the same way that when you're writing a song and you're working with other songwriters, you actually would hope that the other songwriters got something that you don't have.
“Then you're in a one plus one equals three type scenario. And I quite seriously feel that it's the same part of the brain that you use in both scenarios, but just applied very differently.”
Simons in 2024 played guest guitar with the band of X Factor contestant Emmanuel Kelly during the Australian leg of Coldplay's Music of the Spheres World Tour.
Vinyl Group is starting to look like a youth audience play, similar to that by the now departed Allure Media.
The company’s latest quarterly report, for the three months to December, showed cash receipts up 172% to $5.333 million from the previous quarter.
“If you take that sort of 1,000 ft view of the company, advertising is really the one thing that ties it all together,” Simons said.
“On our tech platforms, we monetise through a combination of advertisements and subscriptions, but we're really doing the same thing over in the media world.
“I wouldn't go as far to call us an adtech company, but we're sort of heading in that direction.
“We're turning over consistent revenues. And I saw an opportunity as a sort of tech entrepreneur to go in there, cut costs where appropriate, and run it profitably.
“And that's, that's exactly what we've done, and that profit is also really the R and D engine for our tech products.
“Media is an exciting space.
“We're going to be applying a tech acumen and discipline to how we run the business, and that will include AI to help productivity on the side of the journalists volume and really show that you can actually get, you can grow organic traffic.
“I know there are naysayers in the media world at the moment who are concerned about the lack of investment and what's happening to some of the publications.
“I see opportunity and that's what we're doing here. We're putting our money where our mouth is.
“We've bought a few publications in the last 12 months, and now we're showing what we can do by bringing them together under one roof and unlocking potential.”
Simons’ own reading habits are pure digital native. When he rolls out of bed in the morning, he opens Reddit or X, formerly, Twitter, to get a sense of what's going on in the world.
“We have a Slack channel inside the company that tracks all of our own publications output, and that's my opportunity to quickly read everything that's been published.
“I read books too. At the moment, I'm reading a book called The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson, which is about his time as a trader and in the UK.
“I listen to lots of podcasts as well, but I usually listen to more entertainment and comedy than than serious ones. That's one of my forms of release. Books and newspapers for making sure I know what's going on. And then fiction to release and relax.”
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