ASX-listed Vinyl Group announces acquisition of Concrete Playground

Australian music tech company Vinyl Group looks set to buy popular online travel guide website Concrete Playground in a $5m deal.

The takeover adds another publisher to ASX-listed Vinyl’s growing stable of media companies following its purchase of youth music brand Brag Media in February and trade publication Mediaweek in September.

Concrete Playground, founded in 2009, delivers a digital travel guide to Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland and Wellington.

Each city boasts a separate homepage with a news tab alongside sections on restaurants, events, bars, cafes, pubs, shops, hotels and “things to do”.

Concrete Playground founder and chief executive Rich Fogarty said Vinyl would help elevate his company to “new heights”.

“This milestone reflects the talent, creativity and dedication of our tea, along with the trust of our readers and partners,” he said.

“As the business transitions to new ownership under Vinyl Group, I’m confident their vision and resources will elevate Concrete Playground to new heights, inspiring even more people to discover the very best their cities have to offer.”

In an ASX statement from Thursday, Vinyl said it would acquire 100 per cent of the issued capital in Concrete Playground in exchange for $3.5m in cash and $1.5m in shares.

Vinyl said the website had delivered $4m in revenues over the past 12 months and it expected the business to deliver “operational efficiencies” and accelerate Vinyl’s timeline to achieve “group-wide positive cash flow by six months”.

Concrete will be integrated into Vinyl’s media division, Vinyl said.Vinyl has built up a grab bag of assets following a concentrated sweep of acquisitions in recent months.

It boasts a media division consisting of Brag, Funkified, Mediaweek and now Concrete Playground, eCommerce platform vinyl.com, tech platform Vampr, a social networking app for musicians, and Jaxsta, a music directory database similar to IMDB for film and TV.

It also holds Serenade, which makes physical and digital collectibles and merges them.

In October, the company announced an agreement with US-based business-to-business music licensing platform Songtradr to manage and sell advertising across Songtradr’s portfolio of digital properties.

“In a nutshell, what we really exist to do is enhance the fan and creator experience,” chief executive Josh Simons told NewsWire in an interview from October.

“If you don’t have a robust fan ecosystem, and you don’t have a robust creator ecosystem, you actually don’t have a music industry.”

Vinyl Group’s revenues for the 2024 financial year hit $4.95m, a dramatic lift from the $582,208 it booked in FY23, with most of the money coming from its newly acquired media assets.

But net losses reached $16.9m, with an operating loss of $6.6m.

The company’s annual report, published on October 1, warned of a “material uncertainty” as to whether the business could continue as a going concern given the net loss for the year.

The company targets to be cash-flow positive in the first half of FY26 and Mr Simons said the company was on track to meet the goal.

“We provided conservative guidance in that area,” he said.

“The statements in the annual report are pretty generic statements that any auditor is going to put into a company that is posting a loss.

“A big part of that loss is attributable to the valuation of convertible notes which we hope to wipe off the balance sheet this financial year.”

Mr Simons said Vinyl had pursued media assets to help prop up and extend its larger tech ambitions.

“The media arm of the company is definitely the current profit engine and it is paying for the growing tech side,” Mr Simons said.

“The tech side is growing faster, but it also has a higher fixed cost base. As we try and outgrow that fixed cost base, we expect that pendulum to swing the other way.”