From febe.com:

OUR CRITERIA AND RESEARCH PROCESS

The inaugural FEBE Growth 100® is a league table of Britain’s founder-led private companies with the fastest-growing sales. Companies are ranked by compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in sales over their latest two financial years.

Our entry criteria for 2022 are:

* UK-registered, independent, unquoted and ultimate parent companies
* Founders remain involved in the business
* Had sales between £3m and £200m in their latest financial year
* Made an operating profit in their latest financial year
* Did not show a decrease in sales from their penultimate to the latest year
* Had annualised sales of more than £200,000 in the base year, and traded for at least 6 months in that year
* Recruitment firms, payroll services providers and media agencies must show gross profits of at least £3m in their latest financial year
*Excluded companies include: pure property developers, financial trading companies, LLPs and companies with a turnover of £200m or more

Full article available here.

myndstreamspa.com, available through Universal Companies’ sales channels, offers the wellness industry a music solution with playlists expertly curated at the intersection of art and science. The company draws on its extensive catalogue of mindfulness music, and engages its roster of current artists to create new works for the spa market with frequencies, tonalities, and tempos that research shows can have a direct effect on relaxation and mood enhancement.

This is in contrast to AI programmed, ad-filled and repetitive streaming music portals. It also eliminates the risk many spas and therapists unwittingly take by using their personal playlists commercially— which can result in fines for copyright violation.

And instead of the expensive monthly subscriptions for competitor business streaming platforms, the award-winning, research-backed wellness music curated by myndstream will be offered initially at a significant discounted price to spas, particularly for early adopters who are willing to provide feedback and help make the service even more effective.

myndstream’s parent company, Cutting Edge Media Music, is the leading independent full-service provider of “music for moments” across the film, television, videogames and advertising industries and is responsible for commercializing the music in such high-profile productions as Bridgerton, Stranger Things, The King’s Speech, Drive, Sicario, and many more. myndstream is following in the footsteps of its parent by elevating the way we experience music, but this time for optimal, immersive audio wellness experiences.

Harnessing the power of music for personal wellbeing, myndstream invites today’s wellness-conscious listener to stream mindfulness wherever you are to reduce stress, experience deep rest, improve focus, and calm anxiety.

Full article available here.

On the back end, it’s been building up its roster of composers steeped in the mindfulness realm as well as immersing in research and activations at the nexus of music and wellness. Moross recently co-founded and serves as CEO of Aybe, a company that will service neurodiverse families with music therapy and other resources.

On the public-facing side, Myndstream is not only elevating its presence on the streaming dial but also building communities across YouTube and other platforms.

“A lot of people see music as music. What we want to do is get people to see music as an incredible mental health product and wellness product. Whatever we can do to bridge that gap is what we’re looking to do at the moment,” Moross says.

Playlisting, of course, is the currency du jour. A full 95 percent of Myndstream’s current income is derived from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify and YouTube, where its artists and composers have collectively amassed billions of streams. The inclusion of its soundscapes in Amazon mood playlists alone brought in 45 percent of the company’s income in 2020, according to Moross.

“How do you get your music streamed more? The short answer across most platforms is playlists; you need to fight for shelf space,” he opines.

But at a time when people of all ages are increasingly turning to wellness apps and other sources to aid their mental health, Moross believes Myndstream’s credibility will enable it to continue to rise. A case in point is the label’s most salient artist, Liquid Mind, an Emmy-nominated songwriter, keyboardist, composer, producer and recording artist who has strong ties to the music therapy community.

“Our key differentiator is our music isn’t computer-generated. We have 100 or so living, breathing artists who have been doing this music for more than 40 years. We understand what kind of music works well for focus, what kind of music works well for relaxation,” he says.

The YouTube Generation

A key part of Myndstream’s growth plan is expanding its audience beyond the traditional demographic for mood music of women aged 40-plus. It’s a good bet, given that 41 percent of millennials and 46 percent of Gen Z’ers reported feeling stressed or anxious most or all of the time in a recent Deloitte Global survey.

To do so, some of the label’s artists are leveraging a sound it’s calling “slo-fi,” a riff on the popular “lo-fi” genre that takes pop and rock beats and slows them down to create a nuanced, meditative format. Instrumental covers of pop hits from Billie Eilish to Harry Styles to Nirvana featured in Netflix NFLX -3.7% series Bridgerton have been generating big buzz of late.

“We’re in the process of working with our composers on this new genre and style, which we think is going to bridge the gap between the contemporary audience of teenagers and millennials who love the lo-fi beats, but also has one foot in the wellness world,” Moross says.

Myndstream is also planting flags where younger eyes and ears congregate. This winter it bought YouTube aggregator Yellow Brick Cinema, which counts close to 6 million subscribers across its flagship plus 300 ancillary channels. Myndstream has rebranded one of those channels with its own moniker, and is working with the team to upgrade the experience across the site.

“The thing that surprised me is the scale they’ve achieved based on the content they have. It was very much slide show-based stock footage,” Moross says. “I think that team would be the first to say they wanted more budget to be able to re-invest in building quality. We’re licensing high-quality content and looking to potentially acquire a 4K stock footage company and channel. We believe in strong visual components and multi-sesnsory, full immersion in the music. We love that stuff.”

Myndstreaming With…

Other avenues to deliver Myndstream music to the mainstream are in the works. Among them is a series of collaborations with entertainment, sports and lifestyle talent called “Myndstreaming With…” through which the label will curate a custom soundtrack to suit an influencer’s wellness regimen. The idea is the influencers will not only benefit from the music but also become ambassadors for the Myndstream brand.

Announcements about the first two high-profile participants, one an athlete and the other an A-list talent, will follow in the coming months, Moross says.

“We are engaging cultural icons—talent athletes, actors—people who aren’t typically music people but who like music and also really care about their own wellbeing, and we are curating the sound environments for their mental health journey, by creating four-track albums for them,” he says.

“They provide us with some creative inputs. Say one of the things they do to calm down is go surf at a particular beach in their hometown. We will go and capture the sounds of the waves from that beach, get that nostalgic sound bed and then create some music around that based on their references.”

Full article available here.

“Well, first and foremost, the company is extraordinary,” Swizz explains of his reasoning with getting on board with 12On12. “I started off as a DJ so I collected vinyl, but I always wanted to be an owner in a wax company — 12On12 was the perfect opportunity because not only do they deal with vinyl, we’re dealing with art and lifestyle, too. This is the perfect time for people to see something like this come together, and for my first offering to be jazz.”

Full article available here.