ArtistWorks has been acquired by Growth Catalyst Partners’ portfolio company TrueFire Studios, a consortium of major online music instruction companies.
The acquisition brings together leading names and pioneers in online music education – including ArtistWorks, TrueFire, JamPlay, and FaderPro – who together span dozens of genres and instruments while delivering access to Grammy Award-winning artists, top session players, and world-renowned educators. The deal was completed with financial support from mid-market private equity firm Growth Catalyst Partners.
Founded in 2008, ArtistWorks partners with master musicians and enables them to create and preserve their teaching legacy online. Each hand-selected ArtistWorks teacher brings years of performing, recording, and teaching expertise to the table, offering the rare combination of virtuosity and educational excellence.
The instructional format is empowered by the company’s industry-unique Video Exchange Learning Platform, which allows subscribing students to submit practice videos and receive personal video assessments from their teacher. Well over 90,000 (student-to-teacher) Video Exchanges, along with 2,000 hours of music lesson videos are made available to ArtistWorks members, providing a novel online music instruction environment where every interaction between student and teacher becomes a learning opportunity for all.
ArtistWorks has taught hundreds of thousands of students in over 80 countries. This impressive and growing roster of teaching artists and lessons now joins the TrueFire Studios’ syndicate of companies that provides 50,000 lessons from nearly 400 music educators covering all styles, techniques, and levels of learning reaching students in over 180 countries. Course material and Video Exchange Learning is available anytime, anywhere across desktop, mobile, and streaming devices.
“We welcome this new alliance that ensures fulfilment of the long-held ArtistWorks mission to ‘teach the world music’. Working alongside the other top-quality consortium companies who strongly complement each other will allow exciting new collaborations and exceptional learning opportunities for lifelong players,” says Patricia Butler, CEO and Cofounder of ArtistWorks.
Scott Peters, Managing Partner of Growth Catalyst Partners, says: “We set out to bring together the world’s leading online music instruction companies to provide significantly more resources to dramatically expand their capabilities and reach. By adding ArtistWorks to the family, we are able to offer access to additional world class artists and a wide variety of exceptional courses ranging from guitar, bass and banjo to voice and piano. This combination of offerings provides a more robust, diverse and scalable platform for artists, students and leading brands which collectively comprise the largest community of practicing musicians and educators in the world. We are thrilled to have ArtistWorks on the team.”
ArtistWorks will continue to operate as a stand-alone, separate division, brand and learning experience with the full support and continued equity capital from Growth Catalyst Partners, investors in TrueFire Studios holding company.
