Why can’t someone SHOW ME THE MUSIC?

Chuck Englehardt
Nov 6 · 18 min read

Lessons of our fun-filled struggle to help people find local live music…
waiting for an ending that someone you know may help write

Here at GoTonight.com we are often on the receiving end of ravenous praise for what we do in west central Florida… and equally often asked why we don’t expand to more cities. Few have the patience to listen to all the gruesome reasons why no one (including GoTonight) has been able to make a sustainable business out of telling people when and where local bands are playing. This multi-faceted story may be of interest to fans and participants in the local live music community, and perhaps to a few business geeks as well.

In this information age of “everything is on the web,” hyper-local information is the least-well covered area, leading to challenges for small local businesses, and for the people who may want to patronize those places. Providing local live music information is perhaps the most difficult piece of that challenge for reasons shared below and, as a result, show information on the web is fragmented and grossly incomplete, making it a time-consuming challenge for music fans to find a good reason to go out. A sad situation indeed.

For over ten years GoTonight has happily taken on the challenge of listing local live music, and has made unusual headway with its popular show listing service for west-central Florida. GoTonight’s coverage of neighborhood shows is far more complete and accurate than is provided by other services and, as a result, has over 215,000 monthly page views from approximately 35,000–45,000 unique monthly users. Everyone loves our service and we want it (or something like it) to continue! Everyone should be able to find the music that is nearby, and be notified when they are close to music they love.

Unfortunately GoTonight remains an “accidental charity” without financial viability. For the casual observer, and the people who want a service like GoTonight in their own city, it is something of a mystery how GoTonight.com can be such a popular success for local musicians, fans, and venues in their west central Florida area, and yet be a failure as a business. On current course GoTonight.com is likely to fade away as few have the passion and time to invest with no payback. And without an improved system, and an enduring benefactor or partnership, GoTonight won’t be able to revive its hope of becoming a sustainable and expanded operation. Our thousands of happy users hope that our “business-turned-hobby” can become a going concern, whether for profit or non-profit.

This essay serves three purposes:
1. To fully explain the situation to interested persons, away from the distractions and time constraints in casual encounters.

2. To more easily and widely share our situation and what we have learned, to see if new ideas or help comes our way from those who appreciate GoTonight’s quixotic journey.

3. To freely offer our observations to others, in hopes that someone can do better and help more musical communities.

The discussion below describes a market that is worthwhile to anyone who loves the arts, but that has been held back from business success by its relatively small size and few dollars, and by the surprising costs and complexity necessary to serve it well.

What is hyper-local and why is it worth thinking about?

Hyper-local refers to a small community or geographical area, typically with a relatively small population (except in dense urban settings). The term is often used in conjunction with describing a neighborhood-level information service. This particular discussion focuses on local live music information as a particularly needed but difficult type of hyper-local information to provide.

The benefits of supporting community ecosystems have been highlighted by “buy-local” efforts, pointing to everything from the dollars and jobs that stay and help the local community, to keeping the community’s unique character and getting personal service. Sharing information about local live music helps both venues and starving musicians, while boosting patron happiness. Plato is quoted as saying “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Anyone who has tried to find the best local music within their driving radius is well aware that figuring out what is happening where, is often just too hard to bother with. If you are still reading this essay, you may be one of those people! Since there are no easy or simple solutions, we would like to stimulate progress by sharing our knowledge, including GoTonight’s unrealized plans to manage that challenge. The discussion below is organized around the precarious balance between benefits and costs, and then what might be done to tip the scales.

Who would be the readers of a general hyper-local information service?

Not as many people benefit as one might guess. From a business perspective, this is a “who and how many” question, and the first thing to recognize is that small communities are, well, small. Unless outsiders are traveling to that local area, the total monetizable benefits are limited by the number of interested residents. People will only travel as far as they need to satisfy their needs, and local residents often don’t need an information service. “Locals” typically possess knowledge of their community’s offerings without using a hyper-local information service, passively getting such knowledge from past visits, signs, posters, marquees, news reporting, and sharing among friends. In addition, people usually have pre-existing preferences, patterns and social connections that dominate their local interests and destination decisions. And of course information about local businesses only applies to those in age groups that are actively spending, and have the transportation, money, and time to visit them.

All of this suggests that the average resident does not need a generalized hyper-local information service on a regular basis. Accordingly, the hyper-local information that is currently available primarily consists of information with the highest interest levels in and beyond the local area (e.g., local news), and information that rarely changes and therefore is inexpensive to maintain (e.g., business name, address, description). Beyond those kinds of information, the target market is largely limited to people unfamiliar with the area, such as tourists, business travelers, and new residents, plus residents desiring to change their previous activities, destinations or social patterns.

Who would be the readers of a Local Live Music Information Service (LLMIS)?

Imagine if it were nearly everyone! As Tom Petty said: “Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life. There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals, it communicates and does all these incredible things.”

However, the target market for an LLMIS compared to a generalized hyper-local information service is a mixed bag. More people may be interested for two reasons. First, because patterns of “what music is playing where” are not nearly as predictable as the static information about business that services like Yelp provide. And second, because it is not uncommon for people to travel to hear the music they love. Without an LLMIS the population often won’t know what music to expect at different places, and may be unaware of new venues or those outside their area. And only an LLMIS can provide an effective mobile app that tells them what music is nearby while they are out-and-about making multiple stops.

But the slice of people interested in regularly experiencing the best local live music is (sadly) only a relatively small subset of the population. Music must be an important part of the person’s enjoyment of their outing, and the characteristics of the music must matter to the persons (some persons are happy with poor quality and unoriginal performances, making decision planning information less valuable). One might think that more people would need an LLMIS to find creative and original music, along with imaginative renditions of popular tunes, but research has shown that repetitiveness in music is a preference of many humans, even when lacking any obvious distinction:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/04/07/300178813/play-it-again-and-again-sam
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5374342/

Without strong music preferences, the inconvenience of researching (using an LLMIS) and traveling to a selected music destination in another locality can be outweighed by the incremental enjoyment experienced. And strict DUI law enforcement can contribute to the perceived cost and risk in travel. Note also that entertainment districts are a partial substitute for an LLMIS, since persons can travel to that known destination and personally sample the choices of music performances.

Finally, another human preference reduces the slice of people wanting to use an LLMIS — many persons who appreciate music still place greater value on spending their evenings with friends and family. Going to a “place where everybody knows your name” often means staying near home and not looking for the best music.

What has this meant in practice? After over ten years of operations, GoTonight.com’s seemingly impressive local audience analytics still only represent 1% of the population across the areas served. Certainly this number could be higher, had GoTonight’s penny-pinching marketing not been almost entirely socializing and word-of-mouth, but it is likely that it would still be a low single digit number. Spikes in GoTonight usage naturally show up when “snow-birds” come to Florida and at times of party holidays and good-weather events.

Which bands and venues benefit from having their show information in an LLMIS?

Not surprisingly this would include almost all bands, although there may be some occasional music hobbyists and house bands with little personal benefit from the extra exposure. Of course those needing more exposure would be particularly interested, such as new bands, bands that travel outside their neighborhood, and bands that play less frequently and unpredictably in each locality. Also, bands having higher performance quality and originality often have fans who use an LLMIS to find and compare options, and these bands also need to be in that LLMIS or risk losing fans to other quality bands. Finally, up and coming bands needing more and better bookings will find that being in an LLMIS like GoTonight.com helps them get those gigs, because agents can use that LLMIS service to find local bands with successful repeat bookings.

While almost all venues want to be in GoTonight.com, those with extra incentive to participate typically have music that is higher caliber, more frequent, more original, or on new stages, formats or show nights. Obviously new venues would be at the top of that list.

Difficult economics of delivering hyper-local information

On the value end of the equation, something has to pay for the costs and finding sufficient revenue sources has always been the challenge. Fundamentally this is because the community audience is limited, and therefore the value of any published piece of information is correspondingly small. And almost as important, the dollar value of most local business transactions is often small, meaning any decisions altered by the information has a small incremental effect. Of course readership (and therefore value) can be increased with more and better information, served effectively across a wider range of subjects, but that is a task which increases costs correspondingly.

On the cost side, information gathering costs are high due to work involved in collecting a large volume of small fragments of information from many places and people. And the cost of selling advertising or any other service is also high. Independent neighborhood business managers are often exceptionally busy (“chief cook and bottle washer”) and not easily available for, or receptive to, a sales pitch from what appears to be just one of many entities pitching similar offerings. Small local businesses typically have no marketing plan and little or no marketing expertise or budget, often relying primarily on their location and signage for commercial traffic. Products, services or events with a large target audience (e.g., restaurant chains, festivals, etc) are backed by their own marketing outreach, reducing the perceived value of any coverage in a hyper-local information service.

Across the country and the years, attempts at hyper-local information services have foundered as paying people to do the work has been more costly than can be covered by typical revenue streams. Crowd sourcing and cost-sharing are ways to help the situation, and it seems likely that the economics can work if and when the particular service is able to become the sole “go to” source for their specialized information, forcing relevant parties to help keep their information up-to-date, and raising the value of advertising.

Even more difficult economics for local live music information

From a value perspective, local live music information becomes worthless to the average reader faster than almost any other type of information, outside of hours-old traffic reports and yesterday’s weather forecasts. Most show information is of value and displayed to the audience for only a day or two.

Second, a large volume of accurate information must be collected for there to be any significant value — thousands of shows monthly in each metro area. Without relentlessly investing a high degree of completeness and accuracy, week after week, an LLMIS is not going to attract much of an audience, since there are already many places to list events, each with only a small fraction of actual events being listed. Achieving this high level of completeness requires participation from many people, and that means that the basic service remains free, since participation, and therefore value, would drop off significantly if any cost were charged to venues, artists, or average users. However users can be charged for premium services such as those planned by GoTonight (discussed below).

As with any hyper-local information service, the dollar benefit of a few additional patron transactions for a small local businesses and musicians is typically low, and therefore little money is available from the venue or other advertiser to support an LLMIS. However once a database of past and future show data is accumulated, along with patron interest in those shows, revenue value can be earned from ancillary services developed to provide analysis to music agents and venue managers.

The cost side is ugly. Little information is available over a month in advance, and easily-gathered information is often unreliable and difficult to verify; errors such as double-bookings, gaps in show schedules and last-minute changes are common. Hiring workers is expensive, and crowdsourcing anything more than a fragmented and incomplete subset of the music show information is impossible:
— There is no crowd, time frames are short and volume is high. Instead of tens or hundreds of people possessing each bit of knowledge to share, and needing only one or two to contribute, there is usually the opposite — only one or two people (bar owner and manager) with dozens of bits of relevant information to share in the short time before the upcoming shows.
— The few who know the information are exceptionally busy, and have multiple places to post information. The advantages of posting on an LLMIS site like GoTonight are not immediately clear to those with the information, making repetitive and costly outreach essential.
— Local music performances are typically arranged piecemeal and often changed, making the information posting process inefficient, or delayed and forgotten.

How has GoTonight managed low-cost/high-volume data collection?

From the beginning we have attempted to minimize the information collected and presented. We collect only basic show information along with brief profiles of bands, venues and special events — enough for a familiar patron to make a decision of where to go. Since everyone can’t be familiar with all the venues and bands, we provide links to band and venue web pages available elsewhere. We do not host comments or anything else requiring a moderator, and we do not provide widgets or anything else requiring technical support.

We also intended to automate everything possible, including:

  • exception reporting for band, venue and special event profiles (e.g., missing information, duplicate profiles, etc.).
  • validation for completeness of show data input, and error checking for show conflicts and double booking of an artist or at a venue
  • historically-based exception reporting, highlighting probable missing shows
  • automatic monthly identification of priority venues in the local music scene, with special exception reporting for show completeness.
  • abuse controls for non-local live music postings and inappropriate descriptions in text fields.

While all of these were planned and designed, none were fully implemented due to a lack of funds.

Finally, we endeavored to engage the help of others, inventing what we call “assisted crowdsourcing” with people and processes to fill in information gaps.

First, this entails constantly reminding venues and musicians to help… a goal easier said than done. After over ten years of pushing and prodding (begging really), and being the only reasonably complete and accurate source for people to find local live music shows, a little over a third of our posted shows/month are input by venues, a little less than a third by musicians, and the final third by GoTonight “Community Music Activists” (CMAs).

Second, we leverage the passion of local live music followers to help collect data. Our “Community Music Activists” are at the heart of our data collection operation, helping venues and musicians list their shows. Their hands-on involvement is the catalyst for more participation and excitement, creating value for everyone involved in local live music.

Last, we intended to provide for entry of show information by the general public in a pending status, subject to review and without ability to override conflicting information entered by registered venues, musicians and CMAs. Along with a number of the automation goals, this was one of many elements planned for a new system, that we were unable to complete without funding.

How did GoTonight plan to address the revenue challenge?

We planned to develop three categories of revenue — Advertising (direct and third party), premium services (the popular “freemium” model), and syndication of collected information.

With respect to advertising, we have advertising served by a third party (Google AdSense) as well as offering two types of promotion served by GoTonight. First, banner ads that offer advance exposure for future special events, extended geographic exposure for regional festivals, and exposure for non-event products and services. These can be controlled by an advertiser’s location and target radius matched to a reader’s location and search radius. Second, offer premium placement, highlighting paid advertisers shows and sorting them to the top to ensure immediate and prominent visibility, at the moment of the reader’s decision. The sales approach has been to utilize CMAs who are out in the community meeting bands and venues, to develop the relationships that precede an ad sale.

With respect to premium services we planned to use GoTonight’s uniquely complete database of show information to offer two types of premium services. Some of the envisioned services would require additional customer features and data collection, and none were implemented due to lack of funds. Compared to selling advertising to venues and festivals, premium services targets all users, making it a dramatically larger revenue opportunity. The specific services planned were in two categories, each with a number of provisions:

First, patron services would provide several services:
1) Ability to identify “Favorite,” “Good,” “Not Favorite,” and “Not Rated” artists and venues, and be notified when pre-selected combinations are posted (e.g., a favorite band nearby, or a “not rated” band with a preferred genre or instrumentation, at a favorite venue, etc.).

2) Expanded search capabilities across wider radiuses, before and after the current week, and using filters for genres, instrumentation (e.g., acoustic, electric, piano, vocal, etc.), originality (covers vs. originals), smoking, environment (smoking, indoor/outdoor/covered outdoor). Ability to hide “not favorite” artists and venues from search results.

3) Tools to track planned and possible music show attendance, and share itineraries with friends

Second, music agent services would offer:
1) Specialized reporting that assists band managers and music agents with their jobs.
— Future date analyses: matching of openings at venues with unbooked artist dates
— Historical analyses: examine artist and venue patterns to locate talent that fits a venue search, and venues suited to an artist’s search.

2) Information not available to other members: venue & artist contact information, and access to venue & artist analytics pages:
— profile & event page display counts, URL clicks, and event & performance postings & impressions
— statistics on member “favoriting” and planned attendance
— statistics on band “re-bookings” at the same venue, indicating successful engagements

While these would add significantly to system complexity, and would only be effective after substantial historical information is captured, the long term revenue gain could have been sustaining for GoTonight.

The third and final category of revenue we planned is syndication of information. Given the sparsity of information available elsewhere, offer a syndicated data feed for other information services, in effect becoming the Associated Press of local live music. We would sell current show information to customers such as:

  • Contextual Services from Google (previously called “Now”), Microsoft Cortana, & Apple Siri
  • Web Search Sites (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.)
  • Bar/Restaurant review sites (e.g., Yelp, TripAdvisor)
  • Travel & Entertainment Publications, Websites, & Mobile Apps
  • “Things to do” sites (e.g., CitySearch, 813area.com, Unation, WhoFish, etc.)
  • Metropolitan newspapers & their entertainment weeklies
  • Online & print music magazines
  • Music clubs, such as Blues Societies
  • Tourist bureau web sites and publications

This feed would be implemented through an API gateway controlled for volume, hacking, and billing, and would charge a low fee ($.10/show?) for shows accessed for republishing elsewhere, and also would require acknowledgment of the source. We held unsuccessful negotiations with several local entities, and came away thinking that the real opportunity comes after becoming even more dominant and gaining scale in key cities across the nation.

What prevented GoTonight from being more successful?

The challenges far exceeded the investment of time and money GoTonight had available, and the projected financial return did not fit the short time frame or exponential returns demanded by professional investors. In hindsight, there was a great deal of optimistic naivete at the beginning, before the long road and big investment required to reach profitability became clear. While our market traction and strategic plan later became strong enough to attract developers working “on the side” for equity, ultimately the work requirements needed a full time team funded by outside investment. Because the GoTonight’s initial system necessarily started out simple and without any master plan, it was not a suitable candidate for building up the necessary items described above and we were attempting to build an entirely new enterprise-class system.

In the interim too much manual work has been required, and only worst of the three revenue streams (advertising) has been available for sustaining and improving operations. Finding, training and guiding CMAs has been time-consuming and uneven in success. Few have any interest or skill in selling advertisements and, after a year or two, most tire of doing the other tasks for small sums of money.

While the heavy use of CMAs is not a realistic path to national coverage at low cost, our data suggests that a modest number of active venues would provide a critical mass of important data, leading us to conclude that a focus on a continuously and automatically updated list of key venues, combined with additional automation (alerts, reminders, exception reports, activity summary pages for venue & artists, etc.), could make the show posting task manageable and scalable. In addition, we have worked with the local Blues Society (one of over 150) and found that to be a mutually beneficial partnership for collecting and spreading local live music information.

Ultimately meeting the necessarily wide range of user requirements, at national scale, requires investing in a system that handles many types of complexity and features:

Complexity of the permissions, information verification, and exception reporting system required to allow effective crowdsourcing participation by different levels of GoTonight team members, varied roles in venues and bands, and the public. There would be potentially thousands of helpers across the nation, falling into dozens of metro-areas and a dozen roles, each with different permissions that vary by database table & column, and then for each field, also vary by area, by venue assignment, by membership in the band or venue, and by item status (incomplete/complete & unverified/verified).

Complexity of providing the right search results anywhere across national coverage, with overlapping coverage boundaries between major cities, with venues having multiple stages and events with multiple venues, and with musicians with no specific address, widely varying travel areas, several variations of the same band, and many similar band names.

The “Freemium” system would have its added features automated with self-service subscription management and with both prepayments and monthly billing offered. This system and other requirements would necessitate an integrated emailing & notification system for alerts, reminders, requests and updates.

And finally, the advertising sales also requires more system features. In addition to the additional automation described above, the system would need sales tracking plus earnings and motivational performance data for CMAs and administrators. And on the back-end, the activities of selling and displaying GoTonight ads and featured show listings requires storing by location & radius, and controlling by impression count compared to purchased impression level. It remains uncertain how to cost-effectively sell low-cost ads to local venues, festivals, and related entities, but automating a self-service purchase of sponsored show listings would likely be a part of that.

What next?

First, appreciate that realizing the LLMIS dream is possible, even if the average investor doesn’t like its risk/reward profile. A lot has been learned and a general roadmap is above. While the unique and formidable challenges of an LLMIS point to needing an integrated system with more capabilities than most other organizations need, all of it exists today and there are people and organizations that can make it work. And the result can be the opposite of disruptive — helping every event, business directory and search website be more successful. By focusing on just one thing, and syndicating the resulting LLMIS content widely, the cost will be low and everyone will share the benefits of amassing complete and accurate information every week. More information leads to more users and more local artists becoming known, and that added value leads to more users as the public discovers an easy way to see all their choices at the moment of decision.

Then, share this essay with all the music lovers you know, asking them to share it as well, in search of a strategic partner, music-loving investor, or community-oriented non-profit who might become interested in having GoTonight or something similar help their local live music community! This is the arts, and the arts often needs support from the community and non-profit foundations in order to flourish and be available to everyone. You can contribute by taking the time to consider who you might send this to and what you might say to them. And of course you can contact us at info@gotonight.com to request more information or a personal discussion for your own benefit, or to be part of a shared list of people interested in collectively working toward a local live music community solution.

“So we’ve always loved music and believed in the power of it and believed that it could transcend language, culture and bring people together and produce emotions and deep feelings that other things can’t.” — Tim Cook, Apple CEO

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade