Aloompa Insight: Indexing Artist Demand By Mobile Platform

The bar has already been set high as we launch ourselves into 2016. A lot has happened in the four short months leading up to May. Fueled by the creativity and innovation of the team along with an endless supply of coffee from our co-op, we couldn’t put down our VR headset from Coachella and Vantage TV until dizziness set in. As we continue to strive for innovation, we always want to showcase something new to our clients and friends.

On that note, thank you. The response from our 2015 Festival Demand Report was incredible. We heard from managers, booking agents, promoters, and more how useful this information will be in their decision making process. As we began reviewing the results for the 2016 Q1 Festival Demand Report, we looked for relevant trends that we could explore. The recent news of Apple’s first quarterly sales drop since 2003 made us wonder how the dominating mobile platform in the United States may be shifting in years to come.

In 2015 Android held 51.7% of the smartphone market with iOS holding 44.1% in the United States. Worldwide, Android holds 82% while iOS only holds 14%. When comparing this data to the music festival market, you begin to see something a little different. In 2015 89% of our app users for music festivals were iOS device owners.

The numbers prove how much of a microcosm the music festival world is. Solid marketing campaigns from Apple have convinced an entire generation that you’re only as cool as the color of your text messages (blue, if you’re wondering).

Because of this extreme difference in festivals specifically, we knew we had to do a deeper dive into the data to see if there could be any correlations between what type of device an attendee owns and what artists they are most excited to see at a festival. To assign an indexing score to each artist we took into account the ratio of schedule adds per operating system and looked for the variance to find which the artist indexed higher on. The results were pretty significant and are displayed on the chart above. As you will see, four of the top ten artists on iOS are hip-hop acts with the other 4 being EDM acts. Conversely, 9 of the top 10 acts for Android are EDM, six of which hail from Europe. We also saw a total of 60 artists with an index over 1.0 for iOS, while only 27 artists had an index over 1.0 for Android.

In addition to the iOS and Android specific insights, we are excited to share our Q1 Festival Demand Report. The second installment of the report features results from festivals that took place from January 1, 2016 until March 31, 2016. As a quick reminder, we developed a proprietary weighted score that takes into account the number of attendees who added an artist to their schedule, the number of total schedules created and the total number of festivals played in 2016. While it may appear light because most festivals aren’t until summer, it’s a great primer to be able to watch an artist’s growth and decline throughout 2016.

As we learn and evolve at Aloompa, we’re committed to sharing discoveries that are valuable to our clients and friends and contribute to the industry’s overall prosperity. “A rising tide lifts all boats”. Have a question or experiment you’d like to explore? We’d love to chat. Feel free to send an email to brannond@aloompa.com.