Fender's owner now owns a stake in Reverb. Nobody put that on the front page.
Etsy sold Reverb in April 2025 to investors that include Fender's owner. Reverb says the partnership "remains unchanged." We're not calling that a lie. We're calling it a claim, and claims get checked here.
Get the chain of custody right before anyone gets mad about it, because the sloppy version of this story is already circulating and the sloppy version is wrong. Etsy bought Reverb.com in 2019 for $275 million. In April 2025, Etsy sold it. The buyers were Servco and Creator Partners. Servco is also an owner of Fender. Creator Partners is a separate firm founded by former SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor. That is the whole transaction. Fender the company did not write a check for Reverb. Fender's own ownership group now also holds a stake in the marketplace that reviews, lists, and prices gear from every brand Fender competes with. Every outlet that covered the sale ran some version of the same headline, and every one of them is linked below.
Receipts
The source stack behind this take.
Ratings stay attached to the site they came from. Quotes link back to the original page. Suede adds the read, not a fake universal score.
- MusicRadar: "Fender will not get preferential treatment" ↗Open source
Reverb's own on-record statement following the sale, plus the ownership breakdown: Servco and Creator Partners.
- Guitar World: Reverb sold by Etsy, acquired by two new investors ↗Open source
Confirms the deal terms and Reverb returning to independent operation.
- Billboard Pro: Reverb sold to Fender parent and SoundCloud-alum firm ↗Open source
Names Servco explicitly as a Fender-affiliated investor in the buying group.
- Guitar.com: Reverb sold by Etsy, independent again ↗Open source
Additional confirmation of the April 2025 sale and independence.
Reverb's own statement on the sale says the partnership with Fender "remains unchanged" and that Fender will not get preferential treatment. We are printing that quote, not editorializing it, because we have not run the audit yet. Here is the audit that would actually settle it: pull Reverb's own editorial coverage and Reverb-sourced "best of" lists from before and after the April 2025 sale, and check whether Fender-brand gear started showing up more, earlier, or more favorably than the base rate for a brand of its size would predict. That is a receipts question, not a vibes question, and it is the same standard this magazine holds every mainstream review to. Until that audit runs, the honest version of this story is: same ownership umbrella, a public no-preferential-treatment promise, and a checkable claim nobody has actually checked yet. We'll check it.
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