TEAMROCK, the fledgling rock music media group set up by the former head of Real Radio Scotland, is set to create 47 jobs in Hamilton after receiving a £650,000 grant from Scottish Enterprise, the Sunday Herald has learned.
On the back of the cash injection, which will come in tranches over the next three years, TeamRock will invest £4.9 million setting up a headquarters and digital operation with a view to developing a major international brand.
Led by Billy Anderson, the former Scottish managing director of Real Radio owner GMG Radio, with former GMG Radio chief executive John Myers as executive chairman, TeamRock became viable after it raised £13m in private equity funding from London-based Harwood Capital late last year.
It followed up in April with a £10.2m deal to buy five rock magazines including Metal Hammer and Classic Rock from Future Publishing, with their websites, plus industry events the Golden Gods and the Classic Rock Roll of Honour.
The company has since launched advert-free national digital and internet station TeamRock Radio and Country Rock magazine. By next summer it aims to build a web hub through which rock fans both in the UK and overseas will be able to access a wide variety of content from the portfolio.
Anderson said he got the idea for TeamRock in the wake of GMG launching Rock Radio, which as a niche station needed a different business model to a more generalist station like Real Radio Scotland.
Whereas a generalist outlet is about getting the biggest possible audience and selling space to advertisers, niche outlets form much stronger bonds with fans that make them more amenable to spending larger amounts of time and potentially money.
"I could see something in specific genre radio that really appealed," said Anderson. "I put it to the board but couldn't get any traction."
Having departed to pursue an unsuccessful management buyout of Rock Radio, he set up TeamRock along with three other industry associates: Alan Clarke, former managing partner at The Bridge ad agency; former Rock Radio brand manager Ciaran O'Toole; and Cameron Pirie former general manager of defunct station, Scot FM.
The team had to finance themselves for two years before the Harwood funding arrived, living on shoestring budgets.
"Last year, we went to the Golden Gods awards to help develop our industry persona and we didn't have enough money to stay in a hotel. So we slept in a car outside the venue. Now we own the event," said Anderson.
Operations director Clarke said TeamRock is working hard to establish links with the rock industry around the world to take advantage of a huge fanbase that spans from Latin America to southeast Asia.
He said: "Right now, the vast majority of revenues are generated in the UK. In five years' time, we expect it to be the vast minority."
He added that the company is keeping its magazine operation in London, close to the heart of the industry, and had launched TeamRock Radio there because a studio space became available in Southwark, a fairly central location.
The company persuaded Scottish Enterprise to back it, on the basis that it would have saved it about £1m in the short-term had it located the headquarters in London. But Clarke believes this advantage will gradually reverse as TeamRock becomes a bigger player. Functions being located in Hamilton include finance, human resources, web development and international advertising sales.
Clarke added that TeamRock would make money from its digital hub in a variety of ways, including micro-payments for content, advertising, subscriptions, sponsorship and commissions on third-party products such as concert tickets.
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