TREBEL, the ad-supported music app that lets users download and stream licensed music offline at no cost, has acquired superfan platform Sesh.
The deal pairs TREBEL‘s listener base across the United States and Latin America with Sesh‘s tools for identifying and activating fans on behalf of artists and their teams.
Neither TREBEL nor Sesh disclosed financial terms of the acquisition, which was announced via posts on LinkedIn on Thursday (July 30).
TREBEL says its brand-sponsored service reaches millions of listeners on a licensed catalog of more than 100 million tracks from every major label and leading distributor.
In its announcement, TREBEL said that what it had lacked until the deal was “a robust artist services side.”
Sesh‘s technology, TREBEL said, “turns a listener into an identified fan in under a minute,” and pairs that with campaign tooling to reach those fans directly and a CRM built for artist teams.
“An artist can reach millions of strangers with one post, but can’t activate a thousand fans who truly matter,” TREBEL said.
“For artists and their teams, this means the audience and the tools to reach it finally live in the same place,” TREBEL added.
“Pepe del Río and Iñigo-Hubertus Bunzl Pelayo built something we deeply respect, on a thesis we share, and we are thrilled to join forces with them in strengthening the connection between artists and their fans,” TREBEL said.
“Pepe del Río and Iñigo-Hubertus Bunzl Pelayo built something we deeply respect, on a thesis we share, and we are thrilled to join forces with them in strengthening the connection between artists and their fans.”
TREBEL
“Five years ago we founded Sesh with a clear thesis: the future of the music business is direct, owned relationships between artists and their fans,” said Pepe del Río, Sesh‘s co-founder and CEO.
DelRío said: “TREBEL has built one of the most differentiated music platforms in the Americas: massive audience, deep relationships with the major labels, and a business model that grows the pie for rights holders instead of fighting over it.”
“They built the audience. We built the artist layer,” del Río added.
At the time, the company said it worked with more than 250 artists including Anitta, Yeri Mua, Mau y Ricky and Nathy Peluso, with a combined 1 billion followers on social media and 44 Grammy nominations across its roster the prior year.
“TREBEL has built one of the most differentiated music platforms in the Americas: massive audience, deep relationships with the major labels, and a business model that grows the pie for rights holders instead of fighting over it.”
Pepe del Río, Sesh
Sesh‘s platform lets artists own fan data such as email, location and date of birth, and reach them through a Member Card saved to a fan’s phone wallet.
In that filing, the company reported 3.2 million monthly active users and $2.33 million in revenue for 2020, and described its target market as the billions of listeners worldwide who do not pay for music subscriptions.
The app has since expanded across Latin America, and in 2021 struck a licensing partnership with Merlin, the independent-label rights agency.
The acquisition lands as music companies move to build businesses around artists’ most engaged fans, a superfan monetization opportunity that Goldman Sachs valued at $4.5 billion in 2024.
