Simon Hade and Olly Barnes unveil new venture Nextbeat with spin-out of hit music game Beatstar

14 January 2025 - Press release

Space Ape Games and Voisey Co-Founders Team Up With Games Industry Giant Supercell for ‘Gamechanging’ new Music Venture

Simon Hade and Olly Barnes, best known individually as highly innovative and successful music and gaming entrepreneurs, have unveiled their new venture NEXTBEAT, a music-based entertainment company.

The NEXTBEAT team includes CFO Joe Adams, a hugely experienced finance executive across the media and gaming sectors and a 30 person team based in London made up largely of alumni of the games teams covering all facets of design, development, operations and music licensing.
The two founders, who have both co-founded, scaled and successfully exited high profile tech companies are partnering with Supercell,  one of the world’s biggest gaming companies behind the hugely successful Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars mobile gaming brands, following its acquisition of Space Ape Games, the award winning UK mobile games company Hade co-founded with John Earner in 2012 and for which Olly Barnes was a long term advisor.   In 2017 Supercell acquired a majority stake in Space Ape Games for $56m, increasing its stake to 75% following the studio’s entry into the music gaming market in 2022. Supercell announced an intention to purchase the remaining shares of the company for an undisclosed fee in November 2024 and for the studio to form the backbone of their expansion into the UK.  
 
As part of this acquisition Hade and Barnes arranged to spin out two of the company’s most successful and profitable music and gaming platforms, Beatstar and Countrystar to the new venture, NEXTBEAT, which Supercell would be an active minority shareholder in, along with substantial external investment. 
 
Launched globally in 2021 Beatstar, which was developed over 5 years within Space Ape Games by a team that included Hade (as COO and co-founder of the studio) and Barnes (who led music strategy and rights acquisition), was the first free-to-play mobile game to license a large 850+ song catalog of both masters and publishing from the music industry and has global deals in place with all major and large indie labels and publishers alongside 90 other rights owners. It has attracted nearly 100m lifetime downloads since launch and is expected to surpass $200m lifetime revenue this year.  Its follow up Countrystar is rapidly building a strong fan base and NEXTBEAT are looking to develop other genre specific versions of these platforms as part of its offering.  The franchise is the top grossing music game series in the West, defining the music genre on mobile and winning numerous awards including the coveted Google’s Players Choice award, Apple Editors’ Choice and Game of the Year at the Mobile Game Awards 2022.

NEXTBEAT is focused on creating ‘non-streaming monetization’ for the music industry - an enormous priority for artists and catalog owners alike - and will initially double down on gaming with several new title launches and partnerships in the works.  It then intends to bring their licensing and game development expertise into adjacent sectors like ed tech and mental health that the team have identified as primed for significant evolution and growth.
 
Olly Barnes, a longstanding music industry executive who co-founded the hugely popular music making App Voisey that was acquired by Snapchat for $70m in 2020 said, “Beatstar taught us that there is huge per-user monetization potential for music in gaming, far surpassing streaming service subscriptions. The vast mobile gaming audience and ARPU insights from Countrystar's genre-focused approach underscored the need to launch a fully resourced company dedicated to this opportunity.”.

Simon Hade, NEXTBEAT CEO and renowned mobile gaming entrepreneur and investor added, “As soon as we played the first prototype of Beatstar we knew we had something special that could really break new ground.  I look forward to building on the momentum of the talented Space Ape team, as NEXTBEAT, to expand into more experiences, games and apps that showcase the inspiration and creativity of our artist partners.  Addressing this immense opportunity, now, with a dedicated music-focused venture rather than a traditional mobile gaming studio approach makes this partnership an exciting step forward for all concerned and I'm thrilled that the team at Supercell shared our ambitious vision.

Janne Snellman, CSO of Supercell said, “We are excited to continue on the journey that started with Beatstar and see the next phase of music-first business alongside NextBeat’s talented team.”