“Music Discovery Service” Jukely is Broken
A study in questionable leadership, contempt for customers, and the tension between investors and users
Jukely, the four-year-old subscription guest-list-cum-production company, which describes itself as “a music discovery service,” “unlimited concerts for $25/month,” and occasionally as “the Netflix of concerts,” has finally lost my business. Not because it isn’t useful: though their selection of popular venues (at least in NYC) has noticeably waned over the past year, and the company has put on some of the worst “live” shows I’ve ever seen, it has still been nice to have a frictionless, app-based opportunity to snag a spot to a show I maybe, sort-of, might want to go to ( — it’s not reliable enough to depend on for the shows you definitely want to go to).
It’s not about the wasted money. I’ve spent at least $780 on the service in the past year, and claimed passes for 25 shows, about 15 of which I probably would have bought tickets for if it weren’t for Jukely, making for an estimated loss of about $200. But I don’t have any regrets about financially supporting innovation in the music space. I was happy to sign up for a two-spot extended-view membership (at a cost of $65/month).
How are they gonna make this business model work?? I wondered repeatedly as one of their early customers, snagging passes to sold out shows at Output and Verboten (RIP). At some point I thought to check Crunchbase. Ah, there’s the rub: they’ve raised $11.4M in 5 rounds of funding, the most recent round valued at $8M in April 2016. Perhaps most interesting, their user satisfaction has seemed to decline in inverse proportion to their VC funding.
No, it’s not about my wasted money, nor about my frustration with the waning venue selection, nor the abysmal production of their self-produced “live” shows. This is about leadership. This is about strategy. This is about their rampant and transparent quest for saleable metrics to show their investors. Their painfully obvious attempts to increase new memberships (especially annual ones — their highest membership tier) at the expense of the user experience for loyal customers is inexcusable. That’s why I canceled at a $50 penalty (assessed for making the mistake of attending one of their very bad Jukely Select “live” shows this summer), rather than pay just $5/month to “pause” my subscription. Taste that tiny down-tick in your user base.
Ostensibly, Jukely wants their members to discover new shows they wouldn’t otherwise attend. Or at least, that’s what they’re claiming now that they’ve stopped paying for the privilege of providing guest list spots at Output and other popular venues. But there’s a problem: Jukely’s user activation is broken. Somehow, a year after signing up for the service, I found myself less motivated to snag Jukely passes to shows, and less willing to spend money on tickets outside the Jukely system. Polling my friends, I wasn’t alone. The service actually somehow disincentives concert attendance.
In Spring 2016, ostensibly to counteract their broken incentives structure, Jukely rolled out some sort of slapped-on gamification system: you would now get “points” for checking in at shows. It didn’t fix anything. It didn’t feel like a reward for participation, since they seemed hell-bent on making it hard to participate (available spots for good parties fill up fast — a good problem for Jukely to have, a bad one for its users). It felt like a “millennial marketing tactic,” and quite honestly an insulting one.
But at $65/month, one might only need to attend 1 or 2 shows per month to make it worth it, and purchase tickets to other non-Jukely shows the old fashioned way. But instead of being happy to pony up $45–100 for a couple of tickets to a hot dance party (the year prior to joining Jukely, I happily spent over $1,100 on tickets for shows at just two different venues), I instead found myself inevitably grumbling that the show wasn’t on Jukely (or that the Jukely list was already full), then wondering if it was worth it to attend at all.
In addition to the confusing gamification layer, Jukely at some point also added in a “Standby” feature, which allows you to join a waitlist for a full show and be notified by text message if a spot opens up. In theory this is actually great, besides the fact that Jukely only offers a waitlist for one spot per user regardless of whether you pay for one or two spots at a time. But still, a cool addition to the service.
Or, it would be cool, if it worked fairly. For months, male friends have been complaining that they have sat on Standby for days while female friends got offered spots right away (what is this, Las Vegas?), or that Jukely appeared to be advertising the availability of shows they actually didn’t have ANY spots for to begin with (i.e., Governor’s Ball) and letting people just languish on Standby, unable to hop on the waitlist for a different show they might actually have a chance at attending.
Then there are the more systemic issues. Take poor Jeff in customer service, who has to try to explain to customer Andrea (above) why the Standby feature is blatantly prioritizing a new (meaning unpaid / trial membership) user over a long-time paying customer.
This was the final straw: Jukely’s flippancy in describing the ministrations of their algorithm, which blatantly prioritizes new (and reactivated) members over long-time users. One might be forgiven for assuming that the Standby list feature would function like…well, like a waitlist. You know, get in line, wait for someone to release their pass, and be offered their spot in turn. Not so! A magic algorithmic brew of “data and metrics” are used to offer spots — “certainly not” on a first-come first-served basis. And oh by the way, was that an assumption, or did you see that information visible somewhere? We might be slightly concerned about limiting our false advertising liability.
I wouldn’t need any insider information in order to deduce the above, but I happen to know people who know people who got summarily fired during Jukely’s funding rounds, who are happy to report that the CEO is driving the business into the ground.
As an individual user, the snarky mass emails, near-constant disappointments, sub-par production, and blatantly discriminatory algorithm are bad enough. But taken as a whole, the pattern spells doom for the four-year-old company. Dance music fans are a tight-knit community…Do they really think we don’t talk to each other?
The above from Jeff again, a no-doubt beleaguered customer service provider for what should be a company with a great relationship with its users. Instead, Jeff is forced to provide vague and unhelpful responses to obvious service failures. Jeff isn’t the problem.
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to blame founder Bora Celik, who has actually engaged in twitter wars with disappointed users, laying bare his seething contempt for the “millennials” he so desperately wants to make a buck off of. The erstwhile engineer and promoter(!), proclaimed by everyone I’ve spoken to who has come into contact with him to be a jerk, must have some sort of end game in mind (acquisition by LiveNation?). In the meantime, he’s personally tweeting condescending remarks to people who had the audacity to interpret the “unlimited concerts for $25” tagline literally.
Good luck with those metrics, Bora.
